Disclaimer: this is a review, and as such it contains spoilers of the whole series. Please proceed to read at your own risk if you still plan on watching this show or if you haven’t finished it yet. You have been warned.

The Light in Your Eyes
(눈이 부시게 / Nuni Busigye)
MyDramaList rating: 7.0/10

Ha! Surprise! I was able to finish one more drama within July after all!
I didn’t even know that I would be able to, but when I saw this one was only 12 episodes, I thought I might. And I went through it pretty fast, so here we are! Going on with my original to-watch list, this hidden gem from 2019 has been waiting for me and boy, was it a surprise. It’s been a while since I’ve been so impressed with a final plot twist in a K-Drama.
I’ve known about this series ever since I saw the promotions of the two main leads, and these two main leads were a big reason for me to put it on my list. I really hope I’ll be able to make this a worthwhile review as I very much want to defend this drama. As I was watching I saw a lot of negative comments about it, and I just want to prove these wrong because this drama is so much more than its pace and lack of romantic comedy, at least in the way that most people are probably used to in K-Dramas. It deserves to be acknowledged for its unique profoundness.
Okay, so, without further ado, let’s get started.

I say without further ado, but I actually really have to think about how to explain the story, because there is just so much to it that’s only explained at the very end. I will try to construct this review in the way of how I processed it while watching. If that makes sense.

The Light in Your Eyes is a 12-episode K-Drama series with episodes of about an hour each. The protagonist of this drama is 25-year old Kim Hye Ja (played by Han Ji Min). She lives with her mother (Lee Jung Eun), father (Ahn Nae Sang) and older brother Young Soo (Son Ho Joon) in a small town. Her mother owns a small hairsalon. Hye Ja is in the bloom of her youth, but she is struggling with what she wants to do with her life. She keeps changing paths and career choices as she keeps realizing it’s not what she wants to do for herself – her current ambition to become a news anchor has been her choice because of a senior she liked who is studying to become a reporter and because she’s often told that she has a nice voice. However, when she meets her senior’s friend and fellow reporter-to-be Lee Joon Ha (Nam Joo Hyuk), and he confronts her by asking why she wants to be a news anchor, she realizes again that it’s not her true dream. Hye Ja keeps running into Joon Ha as they live in the same neighborhood, and they develop a mutual though subtle interest in each other. However, just as it seems like they might soon become a couple, something very drastic happens in both their lives, basically on the same day.

Hye Ja has been the owner of a beautiful old golden watch that she found on the beach as a child. She’s realized that with this watch, she can turn back time. She’s used the watch several times as a kid, just to give herself more time to sleep or study, but as a side effect it has caused her to start looking older than her age. At the age of 10, she’s already taller than all the boys in her class and so she stops using the watch. However, one day, Hye Ja’s father gets into a fatal car accident and passes away. Unable to accept it, Hye Ja desperately uses the watch and does a 100,000 attempts to wake up early enough that morning to stop him from getting into the accident, until she finally manages to reach him just in time. When she wakes up the next morning and her dad is still in the kitchen, she can’t be happier – but her family members all look at her very weirdly. Why? Her excessive use of the watch has caused her to turn into an 80-year old lady overnight.

Joon Ha is living with his grandmother (Kim Young Ok, breaking hearts as always), but he has a very bad relationship with his father (Kim Seung Chul). His father pops by sometimes, but he always just makes trouble, gets drunk, threatens Joon Ha and granny, and Joon Ha just wants him to disappear from their lives forever. One night, when his father imposes on them again and won’t leave, Joon Ha goes so far as to maim himself with a rock and report his father to the police for allegedly abusing him – it’s the only way to get him away. However, his grandmother can’t live with the lie and goes to the police to tell them that her grandson falsely reported her son. The night after she does so, she passes away. Joon Ha finds her and completely breaks down as she was the last remaining relative that ever treated him warmly. Then he also gets arrested for falsely accusing his father of abusing him and things just basically go all the way down for him within one day. The only person that was able to comfort him lately was Hye Ja, but she has suddenly disappeared into thin air overnight and now this strange old lady claiming to be her great-aunt starts bothering him.

So both main leads end up going through a drastic change overnight. Hye Ja has to come to terms with her new physical conditions – luckily her family and her two best friends believe her immediately when she tells them what happened. Joon Ha is thrown into the dark, with no one left to support him. He throws away his reporter ambitions and starts working at an Exhibition Center turned Nursery Home for elderly people that basically scams these people into buying fake supplements and insurances just so they can catch the payouts when they die. The guy who runs this scheme, is the only ‘friend’ that stood by Joon Ha when his grandmother died, and so Joon Ha feels like he has to repay him by joining him in this job he so graciously bestowed upon him in his darkest moment.

Hye Ja (now played by Kim Hye Ja, yes, the actress has the same name as the character) initially wants to figure out what’s happened to her by trying to fix the watch, but the model is so old that no watchmaker can repair it anymore. Especially when she sees Joon Ha again and realizes he’s been struggling so much in the meantime and she can’t help him, she gets desperate on many occasions. But she eventually has to start accepting that this is her life now, she can’t go back. She gave up her youth to save her father’s life. She has to deal with everyone referring to her as her brother’s grandmother and her parents’ mother(-in-law). When she hangs out with her two best friends, she’s perceived as their grandmother as well. Reluctantly, she agrees to start spending time at the Nursery Home and finds Joon Ha there, much to her surprise, as a cheerful-looking host and caretaker. As she goes about her way to figure out what’s happened to him, she meets some people in the center that she gets closer to. She gets used to making new friends ‘her own age’ and starts relating more and more to all the aspects of being old. This includes reprimanding her young friends when they make thoughtless comments, because ‘they don’t know how it feels to be old’.
At one point, Hye Ja comes across a man in the Nursery Home who is stuck in his wheelchair and never speaks, but he has the exact same golden watch on his wrist that Hye Ja used to have. No matter how much she tries to talk to him, he won’t budge and he won’t say anything that might give her any more information on the watch.

In hindsight, throughout all these events, we are already given some hints about the truth of the situation. We just don’t realize it yet. At one point, Hye Ja sees a young man with the golden watch and somehow immediately recognizes him as the old man in the wheelchair in his younger years. At that point, she doesn’t seem fazed by it, because she just assumes that he also changed between being young and old by using the watch’s powers.
When people in the streets comment on her walking with her father, she automatically adjusts her story that yes, indeed, this is her son, or when she’s walking with her mother, that this is her daughter-in-law.
Her father in particular starts acting strangely after Hye Ja turns into a granny. At first it seems like he just can’t get used to the fact that this has happened to his daughter, but it’s still different from how the others react to it. I kept wondering why it took him so long to deal with it, why he kept so silent and distanced and just looked at her with the same strange gaze. Also, ever since Hye Ja changed, he’s had a prosthetic leg and is limping. We’re initially led to believe that in the accident that was supposed to have killed him, this is now what he was left with instead, but even if that were the case, it’s still strange because there was no time leap in which Hye Ja might have missed that. So when did he suddenly get a prosthetic leg? That must have been quite a big happening, and yet Hye Ja is absolutely shocked when she walks in on her dad taking is leg off at one point.
Also, whenever the old man in the wheelchair sees Joon Ha at the Nursing Home, he starts screaming at him, almost as if he recognizes him but is scared out of his mind by the sight of him.
Again, these are all things that we realize in hindsight, after we figure out the truth of the whole story.

Besides Hye Ja’s and Joon Ha’s private lives, there’s also the stories of Hye Ja’s friends Lee Hyun Joo (Kim Ga Eun) and Yoon Sang Eun (Song Sang Eun). There’s the story between Young Soo and Hyun Joo, and their tucked-away-but-still-harbored feelings for each other.
And then there are the people at the Nursing Home, such as Mrs. Chanel/Choi Hwa Young (Jung Young Sook). At first she’s a very irritable lady who seemingly dislikes to be at the Nursing Home and looks down on everyone else, but Hye Ja is able to break down her walls and the two become friends. Mrs. Chanel (nicknamed for her sophisticated appearance) has a son who left for the States two years back but she hasn’t been able to contact him ever since. Joon Ha has been her contact person for keeping in touch with him, but what she doesn’t know is that Joon Ha also has no idea where her son is. All the letters and packages she’s passed on to him to be sent to her son are kept in the Nursing Home’s storage room. She’s being lied to as much as the other elderly people who are led to believe that the Nursing Home is just a fun hangout place for people who don’t have anyone left to care for them.
Mrs. Chanel eventually finds out the truth and Joon Ha, who by then has made up his mind to quit his job at the Nursing Home, helps her find her son who apparently has already been back in Korea for a while. She’s able to meet with her son, but it’s obvious he’s trying to keep her away from his family for some reason (still don’t understand why). After meeting with him, Mrs. Chanel accompanies Joon Ha to the airport as he’s planning to go away, and the next day she’s found dead by the river. She took her own life, apparently. Initially Joon Ha is arrested on the suspicion of murdering her, but they ultimately find her final note and he’s cleared. The worst thing is that Joon Ha’s ‘friend’ (Kim Hee Won) and his partner at the Nursing Home actually don’t even care about what happens to the elderly. When Mrs. Chanel dies, all they care about is whether they can get their hands on her insurance payout, and this finally drives them to the most inhuman plan: to send all the people that signed their insurance deal on a “picnic” with the real intention of orchestrating a tragic bus accident, and then to catch ALL their insurance payouts. In the meantime, they also catch Joon Ha, beat him up and lock him up in the basement of the Nursing Home so he can’t stop them. Hye Ja, along with the handful of people who haven’t signed the insurance scheme, come up with a plan to get all the elderly people out of the Nursing Home in time (which, in my opinion, was probably the best episode of the entire series).

But then, when that whole action plan has been finalized, that’s when we are hit by the biggest plot twist of all. Hye Ja, the real old Hye Ja, has Alzheimer’s. She has been staying at the Nursing Home for a while now. The man who we were led to believe was her father, is actually her son, and her mother her daughter-in-law. Her grandson Min Soo is the spitting image of her brother Young Soo, that’s why she’s been calling him Young Soo (it’s also the same actor). She’s starting to forget more and more, but what she can’t let go of are the memories of when she was 25 years old, of when she met her husband Joon Ha, and how they got married and had their son together.
In the final episode, the truth about Hye Ja’s real life comes to light. As happy as she and Joon Ha were in the 70s when they met and got married, Joon Ha was taken from her at a very young age. He was arrested for a reason that’s never explained, and he allegedly died in prison because of sudden pneumonia. After that, Hye Ja lost all her brightness and she even started being incredibly harsh on her young child, who’s had a limp from a car accident when he was really young (see the parallel?).
The old man in the wheelchair with the watch was actually an officer at the public relations office in charge of Joon Ha’s arrest, who selfishly stole the watch after Joon Ha passed away. He recognized Hye Ja in the Nursing Home after she tried to get the watch from him, but as he was no longer able to speak properly, he never got this across to her. Not that she would’ve remembered.
There’s a doctor at the Nursing Home, Kim Sang Hyun (also Nam Joo Hyuk) who is the spitting image of Joon Ha. The reason why the old man in the wheelchair keeps snapping whenever he see him is because he recognizes him too, as the man he once unjustifiedly locked up in prison in the 70s.

So basically, the entirety of the events in the series in which Hye Ja believes she is a 25-year old turned into an 80 year old lady because of the watch, is all a false reality created by the Alzheimer’s. At times, she’s lucid without even noticing it, when she refers to her father as her son and to her mother as her daughter-in-law for example. But we don’t find out until the final last couple of episodes. Only then the pieces are slowly fitted together. I have to admit that there are still several parts of the story that I’m not sure of whether they really happened or not, but in general it doesn’t really matter. All that matters is the final message and hidden plot of the story. Hye Ja even says it herself when the plot twist is revealed: ‘I’m not sure if it was my 25-year old self dreaming about being old, or the current me dreaming of my younger days’.

All in all, I believe the story to be about life and the time that you are given. That it’s the most important to live in the present without lingering onto the past or worrying too much about the future. To enjoy all the time that you have in the moment that you’re living it. Hye Ja’s time partially stopped after she lost Joon Ha, and she’s been clinging onto the happy days of the time when he was still alive so strongly that those happy days started to blend into her current life. She saw her young self turning old overnight, feeling like she lost all her time in an instant. She thought she was looking for the watch to try to get her time back, but in reality it was the final remaining thing she had left from her husband who was taken away from her too soon.

There are a lot of very touching moments in this series, even during the parts where we’re not even aware of what’s actually going on yet. There are so many depictions of life imbedded in the story, in both the young characters as the old ones. Some of my favorite moments were when Hye Ja broke down Mrs. Chanel’s walls by reminding her of her precious memories of Prague, the city that she’d visited with her husband, and the scene in which brief window reflections showed each elderly person’s younger self as they were making their way to the ocean after escaping the Nursing Home.
I thought these moments were so beautiful because they express the message of the entire series before we even figur it out. It really isn’t just about Hye Ja, it shows stories of life and youth from the perspective of all the elderly people, all their memories and lingering attachments. This is why it now makes sense to me why we were given the back stories of Mrs. Chanel, and even of the kleptomanic lady at the Nursing Home when she had to deal with the passing of her eldest daughter. Because that’s exactly what it was about. For elderly people, what they leave behind may be so much more important than what we care to acknowledge. The things they get to pass on to the next generation, getting to watch their children grow up and start their own families, all the things that make them feel like everything they had to go through in their own youth was worth it, their legacies.
Everyone grows old, and it can feel like it happens in the blink of an eye. In this series, Hye Ja relives her youth in the form of a dream (or nightmare) in which she literally loses all her time in one night – because that’s what it must have felt like when she had to keep living after losing her husband. She’s lived on, but was never able to fully let him go.

So yeah, it’s actually a very DEEP drama series, and definitely not what I’d expected. As I was watching it, I kept wondering where the story was going. I’ve also seen several comments of people that are halfway through the story who aren’t sure whether to continue because they can’t see where it’s going. And when the plot twist was revealed, initially I also didn’t understand it AT ALL. I’m glad those two final episodes were there to put the pieces together, but it was definitely a VERY unpredictable thing. The writers really took us all the way through a story that was already touching and heartwrenching from the start, and then just suddenly spun us around to show their true colors to make the whole message even more profound.
I feel like I can now throw all the in-between comments I jotted down in the beginning out of the window since that wasn’t even remotely what the series was about in the end. Things like why Hye Ja’s approach to stop her father from getting into that accident was so unpractical (she literally tried the same thing 50,000 times, how are you supposed to get a different result then?), seem so insignificant now. When it becomes clear that it was all in Hye Ja’s mind and that she got her parents mixed up with her son and daughter-in-law, the minor impracticalities really didn’t matter to me anymore.

As I’m on the topic, I want to make a special point of something, because some people on DramaCool were really hating on this series and I don’t think it’s fair. So there was this one user who kept posting negative comments about how it started out like a fun romantic comedy but then suddenly became super boring and depressing AND (this aggravated me the most) how the main actor’s skills were WASTED on this drama. I will give more detailed cast comments later as usual, but I just really found this unfair to say. It just seems to me that this person may not have even finished the drama and just based their opinion on the fact that all they cared about was a cute romance story. Having your own opinion about a series is good and legit, but to write it like that, just stating that it’s SO bad, that it’s the WORST series you’ve ever see, that it seemed as if the writers didn’t know where to go with the story — honestly, if you watch the last episode, EVERYTHING is explained, so I guess these people didn’t even finish it before making these comments. To post these kinds of things without even acknowledging the real message of a series, even if you’ve missed it yourself, just makes my blood boil. At some point, yes, it turns pretty dark and gloomy, especially when Joon Ha is thrown into hell. But that doesn’t immediately make it a bad drama. And it most certainly wasn’t a waste of the actor’s skills, because HECK, I’ve never seen Nam Joo Hyuk act like this before. He was INCREDIBLE. If he did anything, he showed that he had MORE skills than he’s showcased so far in ANY drama. Basically all he’s done before are romantic comedies. So I’m just mad at this person for commenting such ungrounded and misplaced negativity about this series. It deserves better. It deserves to be acknowledged. Just because it’s not your favorite genre doesn’t mean that it’s a bad series. Same goes for series that don’t end with a final kiss or other kind of ‘seal’ to confirm the relationship between the two leads. I think it’s such BS to base your negative review on things like that. I always try to keep an open mind with new series and this has allowed me to see positive things, even though it might not be my favorite genre.
In short, if you don’t like something, why force yourself to watch it just so you can post negative hate comments online and ruin it for the rest of us who actually do like it? You can just stop watching and keep your opinions to yourself if you don’t have anything nice to say. Sorry for this harshness from my side, but it just pissed me off how short-sighted these comments were – this series really deserves more than that.

Other than this, I’ve also found some really positive and inspiring theories and reviews which have opened my mind to even more possibilities. In the final two episodes, we see how Hye Ja and Joon Ha meet in the 70s. However, even though in the beginning we see both Hye Ja’s and Joon Ha’s stories separately, in the actual flashbacks of the 70s, we are shown everything only from Hye Ja’s perspective, and she is always expecting more from Joon Ha. She’s waiting for when he’ll kiss her, when he’ll propose to her, and even when they’re married and have a kid together, she keeps expecting him to do more, care for the child more, act more like a dad. I read a review from someone that suggested that this meant that Hye Ja always put herself and her own expectations first before actually considering Joon Ha’s feelings. We don’t get to find out why he doesn’t kiss her sooner or why it takes him so long to propose, or why he feels awkward with his son in the beginning. The whole story of his arrest is fishy as well since Hye Ja ends up not knowing ANYTHING about it. Through her eyes, her husband is suddenly arrested and when she visits him in jail he’s been beaten up, the detectives treat him like a criminal, and still no one tells her anything about what’s going on. Joon Ha even dies without her knowing, they just receive a Death Notification at home and that’s it, she can come collect his stuff. As far as we know, Joon Ha may have had a whole thing going on, something that had been weighing on him for a long time that may have caused his absent-mindedness and hesitation to start a family with Hye Ja. We don’t know. But the thing about the theory I read is that it suggested that Hye Ja, in her hallucinations, may have been trying to make up for this as well. In her fake reality, she cares about Joon Ha a lot and we get to see his entire backstory of what’s happening with his dad and his grandmother. So within her hallucinations Hye Ja may not have been just yearning back to the old days of when she was happy, she may have also been trying to save Joon Ha before it was too late. After all, in her imagination, she IS able to save him when he’s beaten up and locked up in the basement of the Nursing Home. She IS able to save him from hurting himself to frame his dad. In her false reality, she keeps him from harm and cares about him, in a way she hasn’t done in real life. The watch may have been the trigger for the regrets she’s had for not caring for him enough while he was still alive. If you consider this theory, then there’s a whole other layer of sadness to their relationship.
I actually know of a play in which a wife cares for her Alzheimer husband and repaints their whole history to him to make him sound like this wonderful person even though he used to be an absolute jerk and their life has been one rocky road from the start. It may have been a similar concept as that. I think this is a very interesting theory!

What’s also interesting is that, as I mentioned before, the backstories of the seemingly minor characters such as Mrs. Chanel and the kleptomaniac lady with their children are just different examples of child-parent relationships in terms of dependence. We can see it even in how Young Soo is depicted in Hye Ja’s youth. He’s the oldest son, but all he does is lazy around the house, he doesn’t have a job and he’s always just asking his mom to bring him food. Apparently this isn’t an uncommon thing to happen in Korean society, the oldest child continuously leaning on his parents while it should be the other way around.
In Mrs. Chanel’s case, her son never leaned on her again after first going to the States and then coming back after his business there failed. He never got back in touch with her and he doesn’t even feel guilty for walking away from her after she passes away.
In the case of the kleptomaniac lady, we find out that her eldest daughter is in the hospital with cancer. The daughter has been the one who did the most, even for her two younger brothers, but now that she’s sick, the two younger brothers come asking their elderly mother at the Nursing Home for money. They don’t even care to think about their older sister, no matter what she’s done for them, they only care about the money that their sister now won’t even be able to use anymore. The scene in which the ghost of the daughter comes to visit her mom for the last time and tells her that she’s all better now and that she should give the money to her brothers, was so touching. The way the lady slowly realized that her daughter’s appearance wasn’t real was killing.
Looking at these individual cases, and seeing all these different ways in which children and parents depend on each other (or not), only gives this series an even more meaningful layer.
This is why I enjoy reading other reviews, because they always open up even more possibilities than the ones I have and even though they might just be subjective, I always find it interesting what other people manage to get out of the story. I’m happy to see that there’s still a lot of people who think of this series as meaningful and worthwhile and who are critical towards people who post negative comments about it.

Moving on, I found it rather interesting that Hye Ja managed to have a dream within her own dream. In her dream of becoming an old lady, she actually dreams that she turns young again for a couple of days. She returns to a day or so before her father’s accident, before Joon Ha gets into trouble for reporting his dad. She manages to stop Joon Ha from hurting himself and gets him to briefly live up again as she is able to stay by his side. Although I did find it weird that, even in that dream, no one even remembered that she’d turned into an old lady – it was just as it had always been before she changed and she was the only one with the memory of turning old. So it wasn’t like she actually went back in time again to change some events from happening, which I thought at first. It was really just a dream within her already ongoing dream.
Another interesting thing is that we get to watch whole storylines unfold without Hye Ja even being directly involved, even though it still happens within her hallucination. For example, the whole story of Young Soo and Hyun Joo slowly reconnecting and Sang Eun’s career path towards becoming a singer. All these things happen in the respective characters’ own storylines while Hye Ja isn’t even there, but they are still part of Hye Ja’s imagination. In real life, Hyun Joo and Sang Eun are still the same age as Hye Ja, they’re old now as well, Hyun Joo married Young Soo and Sang Eun became a trot singer.
By the way, I did wonder about one thing. As I mentioned in the beginning, her family and two best friends immediately believe her when she tells them that she’s Hye Ja who turned into an old lady. Of course they did, because it was her imagination in which everyone believed her. But she never even tried to tell Joon Ha. In the beginning I found myself thinking that, if she’d told Joon Ha and used some topics they’d talked about to prove it was really her, he would’ve probably also believed her. But for some reason she never even bothered trying to tell him what had become of her, she just kept telling him that her great niece Hye Ja had suddenly moved to Germany and wouldn’t come back. She kept asking him if he missed her, but she never went so far as to confide in him about what had happened to her, even though he knew about the watch and everything. In hindsight, could this have been because in her subconscious, she didn’t want Joon Ha to know that it was her trying to make amends with him? That she was fine helping him out and saving him while he didn’t know who she really was? Could that have been a reason? It just baffled me in the beginning why she wouldn’t even try to convince him that she was Hye Ja, but referring to previous theories of other people, this might be a plausible explanation of why she chose to keep a distance and tried to help him from afar.

Another peculiar thing about this series, although this isn’t per se about the story itself, is that part of the cast actually got to keep their own names in the show or names that are similar to their own. Besides that, its feeling of authenticity for me also really stemmed from the people in it, and then I mostly mean the elderly people. Honestly, they didn’t even feel like actors to me. It really just felt like they might have been a bunch of neighborhood grandmas and grandpas that got to participate on this project. I don’t mean that in a bad way at all, they were just different kinds of people from people that are clearly ‘casted’ as elderly people. For example, the three ladies that frequented the hairsalon had a different feel to them than the three grannies in Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha to me, because the latter seemed to be really ‘casted’ as and made to look like typical grannies. I hope I’m explaining my point well, but I just mean to say that using the actors’ own names and including all these elderly people that didn’t seem out of place at the Nursing Home at all just added to the authenticity of the series.

All in all, this series has made me much more considerate of the elderly, especially as it makes you realize that they have to deal with so much negativity in society. They’re viewed as a nuisance and easy targets, and we forget to consider that they’ve lived full respectable lives themselves and that they’ve seen incredible and horrifying things in their own youth.
Two scenes that made my jaw drop in disbelief because of the disrespect that younger people showed to the elderly were when Hye Ja was with her mother/daughter-in-law at a department store and the fire alarm went off. She got onto an elevator with a bunch of other (younger) people, and when the maximum capacity was reached, everyone just looked at Hye Ja to get out. Of course this all happened in Hye Ja’s imagination, but at the time I was shook that all these young people immediately turned on the elderly woman to leave the elevator, to make more space for the younger people.
The other scene, which was also a very satisfying scene in a way, was when Hye Ja and Mrs. Chanel went to a consultation at a plastic surgeon. There was a very disrespectful young couple there that just started making fun of them as soon as they entered. The guy even started taking unconsented pictures to make fun of the two elderly ladies. Hye Ja then proceeded to give the youngsters a finger-snapping speech and this was an amazing moment. The speech in itself was so powerful and meaningful. I found it so ridiculous that these young people would judge an elderly person for getting a consultation, especially since an older person would need it even more than they would at their young age. It just put in perspective how much disrespect there still is between different generations, even though we should’ve all been raised with the habit of respecting our elders. Especially in a society like Korea, where even a one-year difference already impacts the way you’re allowed to speak to someone… This was unbelievable to me.

What starts as a seemingly cute love story with the fantastical event of the main female lead suddenly turning into an 80-year old lady, actually spins out to be a story about living your life to the fullest, but also about holding onto the past. It’s about dealing with regrets when getting older, being aware of losing time. Hye Ja, initially depicted as a bright and sweet girl, finds herself confronted with her own youthful selfishness when she’s older, and attempts to make up for these regrets in her subconsciousness as she’s nearing the end of her lifetime. At the end, Joon Ha is waiting for her to come join him at the ocean, and she jumps into his arms, never to let go again.

Finally I just want to comment on how Hye Ja managed to mix up all the people in her life and made them fit into her hallucination.
Her false reality takes place in modern times, while her real youth took place in the 70s.
In her false reality, her mother owns a hairsalon in which Hye Ja occasionally helps out, but in reality Hye Ja was the one who used to be a hairstylist and her daughter-in-law helped her out.
In the false reality, her brother Young Soo spends his days streaming mukbangs and sleep rooms from his bedroom, whilst in reality her brother was busy with radio broadcasts as of course these modern-day stream platforms didn’t exist yet. She has mixed up her brother with her grandson who looks just like him, as he is also shown vlogging when he visits her at the Nursing Home – she also calls him Young Soo on several occasions, so that was already a sign in itself.
She remembers Hyun Joo and Sang Eun exactly how they are, as Hyun Joo is still making deliveries for her family’s restaurant and Sang Eun has become a famous singer.
In her false reality, she mixes up her son and her father, she stops her father from getting into a car accident, while in reality it was her young son who got into a car accident, which caused him to get a prosthetic leg, which caused him to always get bullied for the way he walked.
She mixes up Kim Sang Hyun and Joon Ha as they look so much alike.
She doesn’t fully realize she recognizes the old man in the wheelchair, even though his younger version literally appears to her in the false reality and she’s immediately able to see that he is that man, but at that point she still thinks that he also lost his youth due to the watch. She doesn’t realize she recognizes him as the officer that locked up her husband.
In her false reality, Joon Ha’s ‘friend’ and the other employees at the Nursing Home represent the people that take advantage of the elderly, and most importantly, the people that have taken her husband away from her, the bad people that have to be stopped, that she has to save Joon Ha from. In reality, they are just normal, caring employees at the Home she is staying at.

I hope I was able to convey the story coherently enough up to now. I was no exception to the mind-blowing effect of the plot twist and I’ve found myself reading other reviews to make sense of it as well before writing my own thoughts down. It’s such a strange experience trying to write a summary whilst knowing that it’s based on a false reality, so I really wondered how to go about it. Anyways, I hope my construction for this review makes sense, haha. I would now very much like to move on to my cast comments before concluding.

Han Ji Min is seriously growing on me with every drama I see of her. She’s so good. I’ve seen her before in Rooftop Prince, Hyde, Jekyll, Me, and Wife I Know, and with each series I feel like I see a new side to her acting. She always manages to pull me in. I think so far her role in Wife I Know has been my favorite, but in The Light in Your Eyes I wasn’t any less impressed with her. I love how she managed to portray the two sides of Hye Ja, the one she herself chooses to remember in her imagination, and the one she seems to regret in her actual flashbacks, the one who failed to see what her husband was going through, and who was harsh to her child after losing him. I’m looking forward to some other dramas with her that are still on my to-watch list. I really enjoyed her performance in this drama and I loved seeing her paired up with Nam Joo Hyuk – their age gap of 11 years didn’t even stand out to me (she was 36 when this drama aired while Nam Joo Hyuk was 25). I can’t believe she’s almost 40 already! In so many ways it feels like the drama was written for these actors specifically, as they even created an explanation as to why she looked older than her age, although of course it wasn’t caused by using the watch to go back in time. She was the perfect casting choice for young Hye Ja, she was funny, touching, raw… she just showed so many different sides. I thought she was amazing.

It feels like only yesterday that I first saw Nam Joo Hyuk in Who Are You – School 2015 when he was only 21 years old and I remember thinking what a cute little puppy he was – and now he’s here, nearing 30 and acing every main role he’s getting. It was SO great to see him in such a mature role and not the typical ‘male lead in romantic comedy’ that he usually gets. He’s finally grown out of the student typecast! I’ve seen almost every single drama he’s done so far. He’s been in Surplus Princess, Who Are You – School 2015, Cheese in the Trap, Moon Lovers: Scarlet Heart Ryeo, Weightlifting Fairy Kim Bok Joo, Bride of the Water God, and Start-Up. The School Nurse Files and Twenty One Twenty Five are still on my to-watch list. So yeah, as I’ve mentioned before I got angry at this comment for stating that this series wasted Nam Joo Hyuk’s acting skills because this has got to be one of the best performances I’ve seen of him so far. He’s only proven that he’s a more versatile actor, this drama has only accelerated his talents! It was really nice to see him here, because in hindsight it really feels like he played two different characters. It was also interesting to see a glint of despair and evil in him as he was defending his job at the Nursing Home while being fully aware of what they were doing. All in all, he was excellent in this series and I won’t take any other response to his performance.

Kim Hye Ja, the woman that stole everyone’s heart in this series. It’s only fair that she got to keep her own name, because it kind of felt like it was a hommage to her herself in the end. I haven’t seen her in anything before, but I see that she’s in Our Blues, which I really want to watch as well, so I’m looking forward to that! Even though there may have been some minor frustrations with her character, like impracticalities or things that she was clumsy at, it only just added to her credibility as a real layered person. I love how she portrayed Hye Ja, and how there were different sides to her. On the one hand she was the main character and she had to lead the action, but then at the end there was something mysterious about her as well. As she suddenly became a main character with an element of incredibility (because of her Alzheimer’s), we never fully get to know her honest thoughts. We get to assume that she may have had regrets when it comes to her past with her husband, but she never affirms anything herself. All we can understand is that, for one reason or another, she’s been clinging onto her youth, onto her husband, and it seems like finally obtaining the watch and the apology of the man in the wheelchair to find closure. It isn’t until the very end that we discover the true profanity of Hye Ja’s character, and it just makes one feel for her even more.

I just realized that Son Ho Joon is the main male lead from Go Back Couple! I was wondering why he looked so familiar. It was funny to see him in this drama, especially since he was the comic relief character here. I hadn’t really considered him to be a typical comical actor, but I think he did really well. As Young Soo in Hye Ja’s imagination, he really was a good-for-nothing son who did nothing useful with his life but also didn’t mind living like that. He was always trying to earn money by streaming from his bedroom, whether it was mukbangs or 48-hour sleep rooms. He shamelessly used his sister-turned-grandmother and ex who still had feelings for him as tools to get more stars on these streams, but every now and then we got to see a little bit sensitivity from him, exaggerated or not. As Min Soo, Hye Ja’s grandson, he seemed to at least be a bit more mature, although he still did the streaming thing.

I have seen several dramas with Ahn Nae Sang before, he’s quite a familiar face. Amongst the drama series I’ve watched, he was in Sungkyunkwam Scandal, The Moon That Embraces the Sun, Kill Me, Heal Me, Moonlight Drawn By Clouds, Just Between Lovers. A lot of historical dramas, I believe, and he always plays a father (figure). I found it very interesting how his character got such a twist at the end. All the while I was wondering why he started acting so weird after Hye Ja had changed, but now I know he just became her son after that. The whole character of Hye Ja’s imagined father from when she was still 25, was false, her real parents were two completely different people. So that was interesting. It was nice that his character also got some closure, as he’d always partially resented his mother for neglecting him as a child after his father died. Even he, as a grown man, had things to process and let go of when it came to his mother. It was very powerful to also add in his side of the story at the end.

Lee Jung Eun is one of my favorite Korean actresses because she ALWAYS manages to touch me. In this series, it was no exception. What an incredible actress. I’ve seen her in a bunch of stuff before, like High Schooler King of Life, Who Are You – School 2015, Oh My Ghostess, Jealousy Incarnate, Weightlifting Fairy Kim Bok Joo, Tomorrow With You, Fight For My Way and Wife I Know, and then I’m excluding a couple of cameos. And of course, Parasite. I believe she also played Han Ji Min’s mom in Wife I Know! I LOVED her in this series. As a mother in Hye Ja’s fake reality she was so tough and down to earth, but she also showed such a fragile side, especially when she turned out to be Hye Ja’s daughter-in-law. The part where she realized Hye Ja didn’t recognize her anymore was just heartwrenching. And how she was determined to keep her marriage to Dae Sang going, she didn’t accept that he was willing to let her go because he thought it was going to be too much for her to keep taking care of his mom. Lee Jung Eun was, once again, incredible. I want her to play my mom just so I can hug the heck out of her, honestly.

It was so cool to see Kim Ga Eun as a tomboy character in this series! I barely recognized her at first! I’ve always just seen her as the typical girly best friend, so it was really nice to see this other side of her. So far I’ve seen her in I Hear Your Voice, Reunited Worlds and Because This is My First Life. I liked Hyun Joo’s character, because I could really relate to her feelings. You could see that she was bothered by her feelings for Young Soo but she also realized she couldn’t ignore them no matter how hard she tried. Being in love with someone that you know is a loser and an idiot can’t be easy. I guess Hye Ja just kept pushing them together in her false reality because she knew that they loved each other, as they’d gotten married and had a kid together in reality. By the way, I loved how old Hyun Joo was played by Son Sook and that she was still delivering food at the age of 80, haha.

I was so surprised to hear Song Sang Eun’s voice in this drama! I recently saw her in Abyss, and I don’t think she talked like that there! That’s a real skill, especially to keep it going throughout the entire series and also in song! But now I see that she’s a musical actress as well, no wonder her singing is so good! Her typical “Waah~ romantic hada~~” will echo through my head for a while, haha. I liked that, even though she didn’t have as much of a storyline as Hyun Joo, her goal to become a singer was taken as a serious aspect of the story and we still got to root for her in that. It was funny how they made it so she would change her stagename to Bok Hee, I didn’t even know the real singer but the way that she said it immediately made me think, Aha, that must be real singer. Just like how the little boy in the kitchen of Hyun Joo’s family restaurant that was teaching Young Soo how to cut onions introduced himself with the name of a famous chef. They made this tiny references to real people, which was nice. Anyways, I liked her character in this show, she was really cute! It was also very cool that they got the actual singer Yoon Bok Hee to play her older version, it just all fell into place, haha.

Kim Young Ok, I can never fail to mention her even though she had a really minor role in this as Joon Ha’s grandmother… Once again, she stole my heart. Just wanted to mention it.

Kim Hee Won was another example of someone who got to keep their own name in this series. I’ve seen him in Oh! My Lady (ages ago), You Who Came From The Stars, and apparently he had a cameo in Drinking Solo and Let’s Fight Ghost, but I don’t remember that. Anyways, he looked familiar to me. While he initially seemed to be a good friend to Joon Ha, and the only one backing him up after his grandma died, getting his father off him during the funeral and even setting Joon Ha up with a new job, he turned into such a nasty person – in Hye Ja’s false reality, that is. In reality, he was a super sweet and sensitive caretaker at the Nursing Home and submissive to his partner, whilst it had been the other way around in the false reality. I’m glad Hye Ja’s representation of him was false, because no one should be as bad as that, willingly able to orchestrate a bus accident to kill a bunch of elderly people just to collect their insurance payouts. I guess this series gave the actor a good opportunity to showcase a duality to his acting as well!

The old man in the wheelchair looked SO familiar to me and when I looked him up I realized that it’s Prince Boo Young from The King: Eternal Monarch!! OMG!! I loved him so much there and I remember being SOOOO mad when he was killed!! T^T How could I not recognize him sooner! Anyways, his performance here just showed a completely different side to his acting, even though he didn’t actually get to say much, he still managed to keep me intrigued and I had so many theories about who he was in the end! It was cool how they eventually made him fit into the whole picture and how even he got to atone for his deeds in his own way.

Okay! So, to conclude this review: it was a WILD ride. I didn’t know what to expect, but this was definitely not it. And I mean that in the best way possible. It totally made it worth my wondering about where the story was going and how it was going to end. I love how it was a happy ending, but not in the traditional kind of way. There was a lot of sadness and regret imbedded into it, so it was more of an inevitable happy ending. An ending in which there was no other way than to move on, because it didn’t do to linger onto a past that you couldn’t change. Hye Ja ended up changing her past subconsciously through her Alzheimer episodes, and in doing so, she enabled herself to let go of her regrets and move on. In the end, all the antics and events that happen in the beginning aren’t even that significant or important to anyone besides Hye Ja. They only hold meaning for her because it’s her way to cope, both with growing old before she knew it and with the loss of her husband. We are swept along in her two realities combined into one ideal reality, one in which she gets to spend more time with the love of her life before the rest of her time is taken away from her. I think the way it was constructed by the writers was amazingly clever, and in hindsight, everything made sense. If I were to now watch it again from the top, knowing that the beginning is all false reality, I’m sure that I’ll be able to see right through it. But the way we are kept within the same confusion and desperation as Hye Ja when she convinces herself that she lost all her time because of a time-turning watch was just geniously played out. It really kept me wondering all the way through until the truth was dropped like the mind-blowing bomb it was.

I’m glad I got to watch this hidden gem of a drama, it’s truly one of a kind. I would strongly suggest people watch the whole thing before they come to a conclusion about how they interpret it, and don’t start turning up with comments about how ‘boring and depressing’ it is, because that just shows that you haven’t given it a real chance. If you’re only interested in funny and light romantic comedies, this might not be for you. But if you want to give it a chance, at least give it a fair one and don’t judge it on factors that don’t even apply to its genre. I, for one, am glad that I gave it a chance. It really surprised me and it has a very touching message that we can all learn something from.

Well then, that was officially it for July! I’m not sure when I’ll be able to get back with a new review, but I’m not going to rush anything. Hopefully I’ll be able to finish my next one within August, but who knows what will happen! To make one final reference to this series, you never know what’s waiting for you in life and how much time you’ll be able to commit to something. In any case, I hope this has been a worthwhile review and I will be back soon.

Bye-bee!!

Disclaimer: this is a review, and as such it contains spoilers of the whole series. Please proceed to read at your own risk if you still plan on watching this show or if you haven’t finished it yet. You have been warned.

Backstreet Rookie
(편의점 샛별이 / Pyeonuijeom Saetbyeoli / Convenience Store Morning Star)
MyDramaList rating: 7.0/10

Hi all! Just popping up to share my final review for July! With summer holidays coming up in a few weeks I’ll probably not get to watch much but I’ve already decided on my next drama so I’ll try to finish that one in August.
Before that, let’s look at this “Morning Star” of a drama! I’ve been hearing so much about this, and it’s been ages since I saw the teaser and thinking YES NEED TO WATCH THIS. I mean, Ji Chang Wook and Kim Yoo Jung in a drama together?? Of course I would watch that! But then some years passed by and I still didn’t watch it and I also heard there was even a kind of controversy around it, so I got a bit nervous to start on it. On the other hand, I really wanted to see what this was about for myself so I finally got to watch it and I think I can make this a good review discussing both sides of this series. I can see where the controversy comes from, but on the other hand I was also surprised by how much it sets itself apart from ‘regular’ K-Drama and I can’t wait to share my thoughts. Leggo!

Backstreet Rookie is a 16 episode drama (or a 2 times 8 back-to-back episode drama) that centers about a convenience store. The store manager, Choi Dae Hyun (played by Ji Chang Wook) used to work for the headquarters of the store branch, but now his family runs the store. He may be the manager, but he doesn’t have any employees so he’s basically on his feet 24/7, leaving him completely exhausted. His family members are sometimes able to take over the store for a short time while he gets some rest, but they all have their own jobs and things to do, and since he’s the main person in charge of running the store, in the end it all comes down to him. That is until his family starts urging him to take on a part-timer because not only is Dae Hyun turning into a hot mess, the sales are also not going up. Dae Hyun’s handsome face is an advantage, especially since it helps promote goods to the regular group of high school girls that visit the store after school, but the truth is that they don’t care about the promotions – they just want to get a picture with the cute store manager. While Dae Hyun keeps convincing himself that everything’s going great with the promotions and the store, he knows that it’s not true.
On the other hand, there’s Jung Saet Byul (played by Kim Yoo Jung), a high school dropout who’s had to fend for her and her younger sister ever since their father passed away a couple of years earlier. Their father was a Taekwondo instructor and taught his kids how to defend themselves, and even when she was still in high school, Saet Byul has used these skills to get back at street delinquents. However, one day this causes her to be expelled from school and ever since then she’s been part-timing all over the place. She’s a hard worker, she’s strong and has a knack for dealing with customers, so she also does well. In the meantime, she’s still trying to make sure her younger sister Eun Byul (played by Ahn Sol Bin) doesn’t get in trouble…. which she does, repeatedly.
How do these two characters get involved with each other? Actually, Saet Byul has been in love with Dae Hyun since she was a kid. He used to come to her father’s dojo and one time he saved her from getting injured. It was love at first sight for little Saet Byul. In the first episode, that takes place when Saet Byul is still in high school, she sees Dae Hyun again and when he tries to reprimand her and her friends for smoking, she brazenly kisses him on the mouth. Another three years later, the starting point of the story as we’ll follow it, Saet Byul suddenly appears at Dae Hyun’s convenience store and applies for the part-timer job. Dae Hyun is initially bent on proving that she’s not to be trusted, but has to eventually agree that she’s the best part-timer he could wish for.
As Saet Byul slowly makes her way up to a regular employee and more, Dae Hyun gets to deal with even more drama on his side; his girlfriend Yoo Yeon Joo (played by Han Sun Hwa), who still works at the store’s head quarters, isn’t very appreciative of Saet Byul working there and starts to interfere between the two of them.

There’s actually a bunch of interesting storylines in this series. Besides what’s mentioned above, there’s a lot going on in both Dae Hyun’s family and Yeon Joo’s. On Saet Byul’s side there’s a whole storyline about Eun Byul becoming an idol trainee whilst still under the influence of a couple of nasty delinquent girls.
And there’s also the storyline of Dae Hyun’s eccentric friend Han Dal Shik (played by Eum Moon Seok), and Saet Byul’s friend Hwang Geum Bi (played by Seo Ye Hwa) who travel their own enemies to lovers path. In-between there’s a lot of chaos, comedy, guest appearances and references to other shows that you might not understand if you haven’t seen those other shows (like me).

Let me start by acknowledging the controversy about this drama, and mainly about the first episode. Honestly, for me it was all right until Dal Shik got introduced, but there’s definitely some issues that have understandably put people off. First of all, the age gap between the two main characters (and the actors). This drama is from 2020, two years ago, so Kim Yoo Jung was 20 years old while Ji Chang Wook was 33. I have read a lot of comments about the surprise people felt that these two actors even agreed to this show. Apparently, this drama was adapted from an R-rated webtoon of the same name, and netizens were just determined to hate on it from the start because that in itself was already ‘problematic’.
In hindsight, the reference to the original webtoon has been put into Dal Shik’s character, as he is an artist for adult webtoons and throughout the story he’s working on something called ‘Her Reggae Boy’. When he is introduced in the first episode, he’s basically arousing himself while he draws his webtoon, making all kinds of noises and movements behind his drawing table. To me, this scene in particular was very nauseating and it made me really uncomfortable to watch. It just immediately made me cautious of his character because he just seemed very dirty and suspicious. Which leads me to the next point, again tied to Dal Shik – many people have criticized his character for being very racist. Not only does he look like he’s impersonating a typical ‘reggae’ person with his dreadlocks and clothing, singing typical reggae songs all the time, but he also gives off a very non-sanitary impression. There’s flies buzzing around his hair all the time, he lives in a tiny dirty appartment, he always seems to be wearing the same clothes… admittedly, it’s not a great way to represent a certain culture, and all the more since he, as a Korean, doesn’t even belong to that culture himself.
Then there was also the issues of minor Saet Byul kissing adult Dae Hyun on the mouth like that in the first episode, showing heavy physical violence between teenage girls, and the low camera angles that were used in the karaoke sessions of Eun Byul and her friends, as they were all wearing pretty short skirts.
So yeah, from the first episode, I definitely agreed with these comments. I was a bit nervous to continue to watch it as it all suddenly got a kind of inappropriate feeling to it. Also, I was kind of amused that they’d BLUR the cigarettes whilst showing heavy street violence and blood streaming down people’s faces was completely okay. Seriously, if you’re going to censor stuff, at least be consistent.
However, to me it felt like after that first episode, the problematic aspects were reeled in A LOT. I actually don’t think I felt truly uncomfortable at all after that first episode, it was almost as if they’d learned from the comments on Ep 1 and then proceeded to make things okay again. And truthfully, even though in the beginning everything and everyone was a mess and an extreme charicature, as the story progressed I think every single character matured in a way. They even refrained from an actual makeout scene between the two leads at the end, even though they got together, and to me that felt like they did consider that showing a kissing scene between two people with a huge age gap would make some people uncomfortable. I actually thought that was quite original, in hindsight.

You can say a lot about this series, but you can’t deny that it stands apart from regular K-Drama. Not just in the aspects that I’ve mentioned above, but I was also very interested in how they chose to build up the story, and mostly the romance between Dae Hyun and Saet Byul. Of course, Saet Byul is in love with Dae Hyun from the start and we find out that she definitely has an ulterior motive when she applies to work at his convenience store. But until episode 11, there’s actually no mutual romance building between the two.
That’s because the drama with Dae Hyun’s girlfriend Yeon Joo takes a VERY long time to resolve itself.

Dae Hyun and Yeon Joo have already been dating for three years, ever since they worked at the head quarters together. Dae Hyun quit the HQ at some point to run one of their convenience stores by himself, but they’ve not stopped dating. But there are some very distinctive differences that should have already caused alarm bells in their relationship way before it started getting rocky between them.
First of all, while Dae Hyun is the most dedicated boyfriend ever who would do everything for Yeon Joo, Yeon Joo hasn’t even told her mother about Dae Hyun. In three years of dating, she’s never mentioned him to her family and that’s why she keeps putting off the moment where she introduces him to them. Everyone at work knows about it, but for some reason Yeon Joo hasn’t told her mother. We later find out that this is because she doesn’t want Dae Hyun to know that her family is actually one of the main shareholders of HQ. She doesn’t want him to look at her differently. Lame excuse, if you ask me, but okay.
In every aspect, we can see that Dae Hyun is way more invested in their relationship. Yeon Joo has to literally keep reminding herself of reasons why he’s a great guy and why she wants to be with him and she also even lets herself get swayed. Her childhood friend Cho Seung Joon (played by Do Sang Woo) is clearly out to woo her and keeps trying to get her to stay with him rather than see Dae Hyun. We find out later that he is actually the one who convinced Dae Hyun to leave HQ because it would be bad for Yeon Joo’s reputation and he shouldn’t stand in her way.
Anyways, Yeon Joo doesn’t seem to be too affectionate with Dae Hyun, even their scenes together seem like they haven’t actually been seeing each other for that long. Honestly, in their first scene together I thought she was just going to be a character for two episodes as a woman that Dae Hyun went on a date with, but who wouldn’t actually be an actual threat to his romance with Saet Byul in the end. The way he got all super nervous when he thought she was inviting him to a hotel and she just took him to the gym to work out together, that didn’t scream “intimate 3-year relationship going strong” to me.
But AS SOON as she got wind that Dae Hyun’s new part-timer was a woman, and AS SOON as she saw Saet Byul, she immediately went all jealous gf on him and it had me shook. She literally forced him to fire Saet Byul, just because she was intimidated by her. Saet Byul was an amazing employee, she even became Employee of the Month and she worked her way up to Assistant Store Manager, but no, that wasn’t a reason that she should stay, she was still eyeing Dae Hyun too eagerly and that made her a threat.
And here we got to the point that annoyed me the most. I even made some in-between comments about this part so I would remember my feelings of frustration towards Yeon Joo when I’d get to writing the review.

If you don’t mind, I’ll now proceed with referring to Yeon Joo as *Miss Audacity* in this review. I don’t think I’ve been so aggravated by a character in a long time, but Yeon Joo is definitely on the list of most hypocritical K-Drama characters ever. Seriously, WHAT WAS GOING ON WITH HER. She literally treated Dae Hyun like trash, she didn’t want to introduce him to her family, she claimed she was fond of him but still she took every single misunderstanding between them to make things awkward and Dae Hyun was always the one who had to come crawling back to her with an apology. In the meantime, she freaking CHEATS on Dae Hyun with Seung Joon, she makes Dae Hyun fire Saet Byul against his while because it will ‘appease’ her and as thanks she just treats him like he’s nothing. She’s not willing to ‘talk’ about anything, and whenever they get an opportunity to talk, she walks away 2 seconds after they meet.
In the end, in episode 11, she breaks up with him without explaining anything; she invites him to dinner, says ‘I want our last meal to be the way you like to have it’, and then just leaves without even having the meal.
The way that she just couldn’t make up her mind about what to do about Dae Hyun, then chose to let him go, then decided she still wanted him back because she realized ‘she let herself get swayed and he was still such a great man’, then proceeded to make him crawl back to her again because she happened to walk in on him while he was being goofy with Saet Byul, causing yet another misunderstanding… just the way she had so much more to apologize for but kept turning all the misunderstandings onto him was so selfish. She kept telling him that HE was the one not being honest, while she was literally hiding his existence from her mother and she never told him she made out with Seung Joon. She made me so mad, honestly, and in hindsight I don’t understand why the writers let this go on for so long. It should’ve just been dealt with halfway through the show. Now it only ended in episode 11 or 12, and there was only 4 episodes left to suddenly make Dae Hyun switch his romantic interest to Saet Byul. Which, by the way, wasn’t done in an unnatural way, but still, there should have been a more established build-up between the two. And then of course, after they broke up and Dae Hyun went through a crisis to let her go, Yeon Joo suddenly decides it’s totally okay to just come back to him after she finds out he gave up his HQ job for her – because yes, that event from the past was suddenly enough reason for her to give him another chance. SERIOUSLY. I was really glad that Dae Hyun set his boundaries straight after that, that whenever she made a new attempt he was like ‘Nahh, we’re just colleagues now, bye’.
Also, Cho Seung Joon was just poking his nose where it didn’t belong. I believe he was the Director of HQ and his father was the Chairman. He got between Dae Hyun and Yeon Joo from the start by getting Dae Hyun out of HQ, and then he also encouraged Yeon Joo to cheat on her boyfriend with him. He even went so far as to sabotage Saet Byul’s other promotional part-time job she had outside of the convenience store, like who the heck gave him any right to meddle so much in other’s affairs just so he could get Yeon Joo for himself? Unbelievable!
Lastly, to finish the trio of most aggravating characters, Yeon Joo’s mom. Yeon Joo’s mother (played by Kyun Mi Ri) is the typical rich lady mom who seemingly has the best interests for her daughter’s future, but also doesn’t hide what her true intentions are. She wants Yeon Joo to be happy, but not with Dae Hyun. She wants her to marry Seung Joon. In the end, she literally pulls a ‘reverse Parasite’ on Dae Hyun’s entire family – she hires his parents individually as her chauffeur and insurance agent to embarass Dae Hyun and show Yeon Joo that she’s better off without such lowly people. It was disgusting to see how she treated people she believed to be below her, seeing them get all excited for getting such a good job offer while she was just openly using them to her advantage. She even had the audacity to basically tell Dae Hyun’s mom that her daughter deserved more than her son. I was beyond proud of Dae Hyun’s mom in the final episode when she told Yeon Joo’s mom off for being an uncaring parent. That was gold.

So yes, moving on to the next part: Dae Hyun’s family. As established above, Dae Hyun’s family is considered to be quite poor. His mother Gong Boon Hee (played by Kim Sun Young) sells insurances but doesn’t have a lot of success, his father Choi Yong Pil (played by Lee Byung Joon) doesn’t have a real job, and his older sister Choi Dae Soon (played by Kim Ji Hyun) is only out for the profits she can get and only visits her family and the store when her husband is away. On first glance they are not a very tight family, mother Boon Hee is quite violent towards father Yong Pil, and we also learn that Yong Pil is secretly yearning back for his first love ‘Jang Mi’ who now lives in China. Especially in the beginning, I found myself wondering a lot how these two even got married and had two children together. However, as I mentioned before, Dae Hyun’s parents also mature A LOT throughout the story. I think the biggest cause for this happens when they find out they’ve both been hired by Yeon Joo’s mom to embarrass Dae Hyun. There’s a scene where Mom and Dad are sitting at the dinner table together and have a heart-to-heart talk and this was an amazingly strong scene. I don’t remember which episode it was, but I remember that this was a really good episode altogether. The actors suddenly showed such great and serious acting that it had me really impressed. Here, they finally started to become a real family and thei values towards each other also really came through. Boon Hee went ahead with selling the double insurance plan to Yeon Joo’s mom, because it would still give her a really big raise at work. She knew what Yeon Joo’s mom was doing, but she grit her teeth and sold it to her anyway because her family needed the money.
All in all, even though there were moments where her constant screaming made her a bit obnoxious to me, Gong Boon Hee was a really great character. She took in Saet Byul when the girl lost her home to a scam of her real estate agent, and she cared for her like it was her own daughter. She stood up for her son against Yeon Joo’s mom because she wasn’t going to let her pride be wiped away by the likes of her.
When she started encouraging Dae Hyun to get closer to Yeon Joo again, she did reflect on her behavior afterwards and beat herself up over hurting Saet Byul’s feelings. You can say a lot about her character, but her heart was definitely in the right place.
Even Choi Yong Pil pulled himself away from his ideals on his first love. He chose not to take the trip to China and when Jang Mi suddenly visited him in Seoul he also kept showing her the door. It was a fun plottwist that Jang Mi was Boon Hee’s friend who had disappeared without a word when they were kids – Jang Mi actually came back to Seoul to find Boon Hee to make amends and I believe this eventually also mend something between Boon Hee and Yong Pil, because Boon Hee probably always thought he still wished he’d married Jang Mi over her. In the end, all’s well that ends well between them.

Now let’s move on to Saet Byul’s side of the story. As mentioned, she faces a lot of issues with Yeon Joo as the latter basically threatens her to quit the convenience store in order to ‘not get in Dae Hyun’s way’. She gets scammed out of her house and then Eun Byul suddenly runs away with all their money to audition to become an idol trainee and Saet Byul is basically left alone, after everything she’s done for her sister. She’s taken in by Dae Hyun’s mom and starts living at his house, but at some point she feels like she can’t bother them for too long. The real estate scam is eventually resolved and she manages to get her deposit back and even though her relationship with Dae Hyun is starting to bear fruits by then, she decides to go after what she wants to do first. She takes the GED exam to finalize her high school graduation and starts earnestly thinking about her future, and not just her initial intentions with Dae Hyun. I think this was really mature of her. When Dae Hyun finally came to her with a love confession, if it had happened in the beginning of the series, she’d have jumped on the opportunity at once, but when it happened she actually took a step back and told him to wait for her until at least she passed her GED. I think that was a very mature thing to do, and it also showed her growth as a character.
While it was a bit selfish of Eun Byul to just disappear with all that money, it’s clear that her objective came from a good place. She may have been quite the troublemaker, but she wanted to pay Saet Byul back for all she’d done for her and that’s why becoming an idol just couldn’t wait for her, she had to debut as soon as possible so she could help her sister. I’m glad the two sisters were able to work out their issues in the end, especially since they were both pretty headstrong.

I also want to mention Kang Ji Wook, since he had a special guest appearance here. Kang Ji Wook (played by Kim Min Gyu) was Saet Byul’s childhood friend, as a child he’d also been under her father’s Taekwondo lessons and Saet Byul always called him ‘Puppy’ (‘kangaji’) which is also a pun on his name, as in her phone she saves him as ‘KangaJi Wook’. Ji Wook is now a celebrity actor, and he helps Saet Byul by keeping an eye out for Eun Byul and how she’s doing at her agency since he has connections there. He’s in love with Saet Byul too, and hopes that they might cross the boundary of the friendzone, but it’s obvious to him too how much she’s into Dae Hyun. Still, he attempts to get between them once or twice. One time, he’s part of a promotional action from HQ by participating in a challenge to take over the convenience store as the manager for 25 hours. During this shoot, he actually goes so far as to tell Dae Hyun to back off, which I thought was quite daring. In my opinion, he needed to watch his boundaries more, because at that point, Dae Hyun wasn’t even actively pursuing Saet Byul yet, so this came kind of out of nowhere for him. Seeing her together with Ji Wook did awaken his jealousy, yes, and after that he did kind of start ‘competing’ with Ji Wook, but still, there wasn’t even a real competition there; Saet Byul was never getting over Dae Hyun. Ji Wook had no other choice but to give up after a few attempts. Even so, he remained a loyal friend to Saet Byul, and although he even got involved in a scandal with the two sisters because of those annoying delinquent girls who were still on Eun Byul’s back, he made sure to clear everything up properly and Saet Byul managed to give this reporter all the information she needed to set everything straight, so that was wrapped up nicely as well.

Finally, I need to talk a bit about Dal Shik and Geum Bi, because this was pretty wild.
Ever since high school, Hwang Geum Bi and Cha Eun Jo (Yoon Soo) have been Saet Byul’s best friends. They got into trouble together, they got beaten up together, they hang out on street corners together, and they always got each other’s backs. All three of them were initially quite violent, but Saet Byul was the only one expelled from school permanently. Geum Bi, being from a rich family, was allowed to come back to school after a few years, so she’s now a 22-year old in a class of youngsters, and Eun Jo is working at a hair salon. Geum Bi gets more storyline than Eun Jo in the end, but Eun Jo is still always there to catch her friends when they fall, the three remain very close until the end.
So initially, Dal Shik and Geum Bi LOATHE each other. Geum Bi has beaten up Dal Shik on several occasions, and has insulted his appearance, calling him ‘caveman’ and ‘monkey’ – kind of insulting to his already culturally inappropriate appearance. But they keep meeting, and without knowing it, they’ve already gotten involved with each other in a way. As it turns out, Geum Bi is a huge fan of Dal Shik’s webtoon and she’s always the first one to leave a comment. At one point, they even exchange phone numbers and it’s like having met their soulmate. But then the time comes that they agree to meet in person and all hell breaks loose when they realize who the other person is that they’d admired so much. After wallowing in their own misery for a while, Geum Bi ends up helping Dal Shik get new inspiration for his webtoon and the two finally come to terms with how they truly feel about each other – they manage to put their first impressions of each other aside to find that they are in fact each other’s soulmates. I think that in setting aside their prior judgements of each other, Dal Shik and Geum Bi also matured a lot.
Honestly, I thought that mostly Geum Bi completely switched character. She used to be this scruffy too-old-to-be-in-high-school delinquent girl, but then at home she was suddenly this lovely ‘agassi’ who wore frilly dresses and flowers in her hair. When she got together with Dal Shik, she really became this person for good, she didn’t even dress the way she did in the beginning of the series and she became way less violent, too. I guess LOVE took away all of her violent tendencies as well.

Altogether I saw a very big shift in the growth of almost each character in this series, and this still made it a very entertaining drama to watch for me. It was really different from regular K-Drama in the way it was built up, but also in how the characters were placed together, the dynamics between everyone were very original and even though they put several storylines into the show, everything was wrapped up neatly and nothing felt too forced or rushed. The story comes full circle when Dae Hyun, who was briefly promoted to consultant back at HQ, decides to go back to running the store again, and falls back into his old routine of being on his feet for 30+ hours straight. Saet Byul, who had been away for a while to work on a farm taking care of flowers (she initially wanted to become a florist since she loved flowers and knew all the meanings of the ‘flower language’) then returns in the exact same way as she entered the store in the first episode to apply for the part-timer job. When she finally agrees to be with him, the two get close to kiss, but at the last minute they both turn to the camera with mischievous grins, and it ends with a zoom-out to where the actual drama crew is shown as they wrap up the last scene. The last part is narrated by Dal Shik, as he mentions that ‘Backstreet Rookie’ is going to be his new webtoon. He and Geum Bi agree on the name ‘Backstreet Rookie’. The original title literally translates as ‘Convenience Store Morning Star’, and the ‘morning star’ part is a direct a pun on Saet Byul’s name. It also refers to the convenience store being a beacon of light for people in the dark night, like a lighthouse, as Dae Hyun himself also mentions at some point.
The romance build up was very unique and original for a K-Drama, because even with a slowburn, this usually starts about halfway through the story. In this case, there were literally 4 episodes in which Dae Hyun finally realized his feelings for Saet Byul after Yeon Joo was (finally) out of the picture, and even in these final 4 episodes, there wasn’t any sudden switch in his behavior. It wasn’t like he suddenly became aware of his feelings for Saet Byul, I guess he realized that they’d been there before but now he was able to follow his heart without any restrictions. The age difference was also never mentioned at any point, so that also wasn’t a reason to keep his feelings to himself. It just kind of happened naturally in the end, but I still thought it might have been better to start this build-up between the two main leads a little earlier. Now it just seemed as if, during the entire period up until Yeon Joo dumped him, Dae Hyun never even saw Saet Byul in a romantic light, it was just suddenly mutual after he officially got over his ex. And the good thing is that he also didn’t become petty, he didn’t even go to extreme lengths to avoid Yeon Joo, but he was firm enough to block her last attempts to get back together, and in that way he also became much stronger than before. In the beginning, he would also come crawling back to her when she gave him an opening, but he really learned his lesson, especially after finding out what Yeon Joo’s mom had been putting his parents through and how Yeon Joo had never even mentioned him to her family before.
I still think it had a pretty satisfying ending. There’s always people being salty when there’s no final kiss between the leads, but I don’t think it’s fair to judge a series on that alone. As I mentioned before, I feel like omitting a final makeout scene after they confirmed their mutual feelings had to do with smoothening out the controversy of their age difference. I don’t think I would’ve minded seeing it, to be honest, because the chemistry between the two main actors was really nice and I wasn’t even thinking about how much they differed in age – it also didn’t seem to matter between the two of them, so who cares? But I can live with the ending as it was, they showed enough affection through their hugs and hey, they were shown kissing twice in the show anyways! One time in the first episode and one time in Saet Byul’s fantasy! So there you have your kisses, go sleep on that.

I think I’ve mentioned most of what I wanted to say! I hope it was worthwhile to read, because I did make some remarks about this as I was watching. It always feels good to be in the “zone” when writing a review when I know exactly what I want to discuss. So moving on to some cast comments!

As I mentioned, the two main leads were my foremost reason to watch this drama.
Ji Chang Wook has stolen my heart in Suspicious Partner and I’ve been following his dramas ever since. So far I’ve seen him in Healer, Seven First Kisses, Suspicious Partner, and more recently in Melting Me Softly and Lovestruck in the City. People may have been surprised to see him in this drama, but I actually really enjoyed seeing a different side of him. He’s always casted as the typical handsome successful guy, but to see him now as an underdog character, seeing him being a complete and exhausted mess was very refreshing. It just proves that he’s so much more than just a handsome face. I really enjoyed his performance in this drama, and I really liked his chemistry with Kim Yoo Jung too, it never felt even the slightest bit awkward. Dae Hyun is a really good guy who proves how much he cares for the people closest to him, even to the point where he makes a fool out of himself when the other person doesn’t treat him back equally. In the beginning with Yeon Joo it makes him a bit naive, but I was glad that he recognized the truth of things well enough in the end to not give her another chance to take advantage of him. I really want to see more diverse sides of his acting, this was a good example!

MY BABY YOO JUNG. Honestly, I’ve watched her grow up through K-Drama and I was so happy to see her in this role. It was definitely not a typical casting choice, but I really liked her as Saet Byul. The first thing I saw her in as a child was The Moon That Embraces The Sun, along with Yeo Jin Goo and Kim So Hyun, all my babies have grown up to be their own main characters now T^T I’ve also seen her in Moonlight Drawn By Clouds and Clean With Passion For Now (in which, mind you, she had an even bigger age difference with her co-star and A LOT of makeout scenes). I also really want to watch Lovers of the Red Sky. I have to admit that at the beginning of the show, I was a bit scared that she would be sexualized in a way, but I think that it wasn’t as bad as it could’ve been. All in all I was really glad to see her in this role because she also showed me a new side to her acting, she wasn’t the deer in headlights that she plays so often, she really was her own independent, strong young woman. I’m so proud of her and I hope she gets even more opportunities to grow as an actress, she’s growing up so pretty, I have to stop myself from getting emotional. And as I’ve mentioned, her chemistry with Ji Chang Wook was so natural and nice to watch, I really liked them together. Saet Byul may have seemed a bit obsessive about Dae Hyun in the beginning, but as things got more serious and she got involved with his family and went through all the stuff with the scam and her sister’s scandal, she really grew up and started putting more value to her own future, not just to being around Dae Hyun and waiting around for him to fall for her as well. I loved her.

I’ve seen Han Sun Hwa before in God’s Gift – 14 Days (apparently? OMG SHE WAS JENNY?!) and School 2017 (right, the police officer!), and she also had a cameo in 20th Century Boy and Girl, but I don’t really remember much of that. She did seem familiar to me from the start, but it’s probably because of the first two series I mentioned. I never really saw her in a big role like this before. Anyways, yes, what can I say, I don’t think it’s ever easy playing the second female lead, especially when she becomes a very disliked character. But as I like to say, when a character sets your teeth on edge, it just means that the actor is doing a good job. That’s what I’ll keep it at, haha. I still feel like the whole thing with Yeon Joo shouldn’t have been dragged out for 11 episodes in a 16-episode drama, it could’ve ended much earlier and that’s what was a bit annoying to me. Also, when after that whole ordeal she thought she could just walk back into Dae Hyun’s life and he would immediately agree to getting back together, like, seriously? Did she have ANY reflective skills? She just didn’t deserve Dae Hyun, is what it came down to. And she also never saw any real fault in her own actions, like in the end she only apologized for her mom’s behavior, she never even apologized for how she’d treated Dae Hyun and how she CHEATED on him. So yeah, the hypocrit definitely learned her lesson.

Apparently, Ahn Sol Bin is an idol in real life, she’s in the group Laboum (I’ve only heard of the name). She has a familiar face, and when I look her up I see she was in Reunited Worlds and even had a cameo in Itaewon Class, but I don’t remember her from either of those. Anyways, she had a pretty wild character here. She was as hot-headed as Saet Byul, but just a bit more immature. At first I doubted her intentions a little bit, but it became obvious how much she cared about her sister and the whole ordeal with her running away to become an idol in secret to pay her back came from a good place. She also came to Saet Byul for help when the annoying delinquent girls started sabotaging her new idol career, and in doing so they managed to resolve the whole thing, so I’m glad that the sisters’ relationship ended on a good note.

Kim Sun Young is such an icon. I was so excited to see her in this show. I’ve seen her before in many things, like Shopping King Louie, Legend of the Blue Sea, Lookout, Because This Is My First Life, Romance is a Bonus Book and Crash Landing on You. There’s a still a lot of her dramas on my watch list, too. I love how she’s just not afraid to show all different kinds of sides to her acting, from hysterical and exaggerated to comical to serious and heartfelt. I think she showed multiple sides in this series. I have to admit that in the beginning, when all she did was scream and beat up her husband, Boon Hee was a bit obnoxious to me, like I remember thinking ‘why can’t she just talk normally??’. But then her character made such a switch and she showed such vulnerability despite NEVER going out of character. You could really see that she was a mother, even to Saet Byul, and that she would gladly stand up for her family and pride against some rich bastards like Yeon Joo’s mom. I think she was a good representation of how people grow up differently, and how they are still wise enough to see what’s going on, even when they’re being manipulated by people who are ‘better off’ than them. She represented her neighborhood but never lost her values. Again, I ended up loving her.

I’ve also seen Lee Byung Joon in several dramas before, like Secret Garden, Dream High, Me Too, Flower!, I Hear Your Voice, She Was Pretty, Another Oh Hae Young, Hwarang, Sensitive Boss, Go Back Couple, I’m Not a Robot and What’s Wrong With Secretary Kim?. I don’t think I ever really saw him in a very big role as the main lead’s father like in this series. I liked that the writers gave him some backstory too, and also found an opportunity to show how his character developed and grew in his own way. He also came face to face with being embarrassed and this caused him to completely devote himself to his wife and kids, and to stop yearning for that faraway first love in China. I don’t think I’ve ever liked his character as much as here before in previous shows, he was a good guy.

I thought I recognized Eum Moon Seok at first, but I actually don’t think I’ve seen any dramas with him before! So he was a new face to me. On one hand I am pretty curious what the actor has to say about Dal Shik’s character, especially after the whole controversy. It must have been a whole experience walking around in that attire. He occasionally switched to the hairdo he had in The Fiery Priest in a fun, inside cameo kind of way, but nothing was ever explained about why he’d chosen to live his life as he did and why he chose to walk around with this look. On the other hand, it did show that he had made his choice leaving behind his family’s rural land and living by himself in Seoul like this, he didn’t seem to have any shame regarding how he dressed or presented himself, so he must have had a certain confidence in that aspect. His character started out as the most problematic to me, but he became more bearable throughout the series as it’s established that he is a very loyal friend to Dae Hyun and overall a good person with a very romantic heart. I could’ve seen it coming that he and Geum Bi would end up together, but I still found it amusing that they did.

I haven’t seen any of Seo Ye Hwa or Yoon Soo’s dramas before, so they were both new faces to me too! While at first they seemed to be like Saet Byul’s irresponsible street friends, as we get to know them better we also find out how loyal they are and especially Geum Bi shows us a whole different side to her character and life. From her first appearance, I would’ve never guessed that she would be the friend who managed to get Saet Byul in that super deluxe hospital room, it went against her initial image so much!
But I both liked them, and maybe I’ll see them again in another drama one day!

So yeah, with that I think I can conclude this review! I had a good time watching this, and I’m glad that I gave it a chance despite the controversy. I was surprised by how different it was from the usual K-Drama in terms of characters and build-up. Both the start and the ending weren’t typical for a K-Drama in my opinion, but they managed to pull it off and as a result the drama was at times very bizarre, but that in turn made it pretty interesting for me. I like when writers suddenly seem to change course and head in an unpredictable way but still manage to wrap up the story without making the change too random.
In the end I think they succeeded in creating a story about family, or maybe just the feeling of family, surrounding this convenience store. The convenience store was the true main character. It stood at the center of the majority of the events in the series, it became the place in which Dae Hyun and Saet Byul finally came together, it even became part of the family, you could say. Even if the neighborhood was a little shabby, it was still a community, and the convenience store really was the beacon at the center of it.
Having a place like that in a neighborhood like that, I think, is very special and important.
I’m glad I gave this drama a fair chance, as I did end up enjoying it.

So now I’m going back to my watch list for a bit, to some more series from a couple of years ago. I will be going on holiday in a few weeks so I hope to be able to finish the next review within August, but we’ll see, because I also don’t want to rush anything.
Anyways, thanks for reading again and until next time! Bye-bee!

Disclaimer: this is a review, and as such it contains spoilers of the whole series. Please proceed to read at your own risk if you still plan on watching this show or if you haven’t finished it yet. You have been warned.

Our Beloved Summer
(그 해 우리는 / Geu Hae Urineun)
MyDramaList rating: 7.0/10

Hi everyone! I hope everyone is enjoying the summer period wherever they are. It’s been a bit stressful for me the last few weeks because of work-related stuff, and I’ve really had to make compromises when it came to taking holidays, but I feel like I’m finally getting back on track. In the meantime, I’ve been watching a couple of other Netflix series alongside this one, so it took me some time to finish it. This summer drama from last year which was pushed up on my list because I simply couldn’t be patient anymore. I was already planning on watching it since I was just finishing the webtoon when it came out, but after people started recommending it I knew I couldn’t let it slide. And now that I’ve finished it, I see why! I’m glad I got to see it now because, like the previous one, it just fits into the current season so well and it really made me nostalgic of previous, more careless times. Even though there might not be a very eventful storyline, I think this drama is a very reflecting and healing drama. Let’s get to it, shall we?

Our Beloved Summer is a 16-episode Netflix K-Drama with episodes of about an hour long. It tells the story of Choi Woong (played by Choi Woo Shik) and Gook Yeon Soo (played by Kim Da Mi). When they were in high school, they were part of a documentary featuring them as the first (Yeon Soo) and last (Woong) ranking students. Ten years later, this documentary suddenly starts trending again. The lightness of the youths depicted in it is reminiscent of those nostalgic summer high school days and this attracts a lot of people to it. The producer of the documentary then comes up with the idea to make a sequel documentary, to show the viewers what has become of these two characters ten years later. Sounds like a fun idea, right? But what the viewers don’t know is that in the last ten years, a lot has changed between Woong and Yeon Soo. The two actually dated for 5 years and then broke up in quite a painful way, so they’re not exactly on speaking terms anymore.
Woong has always lived a carefree and unambitious life. He’s been incredibly spoiled by his parents and left to do whatever he wanted. His parents (played by the heartwarming combi Park Won Sang and Seo Jung Yeon) own a restaurant chain named after Woong and they’re doing very well in the neighborhood, so Woong has never had to worry about money. He’s always claimed that he wants to live a peaceful life in which he can fall asleep under the sun by day and under a lamp by night and that’s all he needs. He’s the kid who’s always sleeping in class even though he’d definitely rank higher if he just put a little effort in his studying. One talent that he does have, is drawing. It’s the only thing he can get himself to focus on completely. Ten years later, he has become a famous yet anonymous artist under the name Go Oh, praised for his great attention to detail in the buildings he features. He doesn’t draw people.
Yeon Soo is the complete opposite of Woong. She was the highest ranking student in school and has always seemed quite indifferent when it came to maintaining social contacts. She’s more focussed on her studies than on hanging out with friends in her free time. She lives with her grandmother and they are actually quite poor, so Yeon Soo feels like she’d better focus on taking care of her grandma than play around by herself. She is initially aggravated by Woong, as he seems so carefree and spoiled. She gradually opens up to him throughout the documentary, but in the beginning it seems like a miracle how they got these two polar opposites to work together. Ten years later, she is working at a small company called RUN that organizes events and collaborations between artists and foundations and such.
So yeah, the documentary they featured in as teens is a huge success and ten years later, the producer at the time, Park Dong Il (played by Jo Bok Rae), comes up with the idea to make a sequel. This time he won’t be producing it himself, though, he hands over the baton to Kim Ji Woong (played by Kim Sung Chul). Ji Woong has been Woong’s best friend since childhood, and he was a part of the original documentary as well since he was friends with the two protagonists. After the documentary ended, he expressed interest in working behind the camera and Park Dong Il took him on his team after he graduated. Now, Ji Woong is the one standing behind the camera filming his friends, knowing fully well that this is not going to be easy.
As far as main characters go, there’s also NJ (played by Noh Jung Eui), a celebrity who develops an interest in Go Oh’s drawings and ultimately develops feelings for Woong himself as well.
The two main supporting characters are Goo Eun Ho (played by Ahn Dong Goo), Woong’s manager, and Lee Sol Yi (played by Park Jin Joo), Yeon Soo’s best friend who just started her own bar.
So the story of this series starts with Woong and Yeon Soo coincidentally meeting again through work, before they’re purposely brought together again by Ji Woong’s initiative for a sequal documentary. Although they both end up accepting mostly to spite each other, during the recordings they are inevitably drawn back to one another until they officially can no longer deny that there’s still something there. In the meantime, Ji Woong and NJ’s storylines are explored further and all in all we learn that there’s a lot more to all the characters than meets the eye.

I don’t think this will be a very long review since there’s not a lot happening in terms of action or plot, it’s really just a story depicting the relationships between a group of people, with focus on Woong and Yeon Soo as they find their way back to each other. I think I’ve already established the setting of the story and its main characters well enough in the above paragraph, so let’s get straight on to analyzing.

So first of all, as I mentioned, I’d been reading the webtoon of the same name and I wanted to finish that first before starting on the drama series. At first
I just assumed that this would be an adaptation of the webtoon, but actually
it’s more like a sequel – exactly like how in the series they are making a
sequel to the original documentary. The drama series starts where the webtoon
ends. The webtoon only depicts the period during high school in which they film the OG documentary, and it ends when the filming ends, when Woong and Yeon Soo first develop feelings for each other and decide to date, and when Ji Woong tells Park Dong Il that he might be interested in the work he’s doing. So that in itself was pretty refreshing. The fact that it wasn’t a literal adaptation but the series took the creative liberty to continue the story like that, I think that’s a pretty original way of adapting and of course it also created new expectations. If it had been just a literal adaptation, it would have taken some of the thrill away for me because I’d already know what was going to happen since I read the webtoon. But creating that twist from the start, the fastforward to ten years later, immediately made me go 👁👄👁. And they did so much more than just create a continuation of the original webtoon. They created an opportunity to dive even deeper into the characters’ backgrounds and storylines than the webtoon did. We find out so much more about the characters,
where they come from, what struggles they’re dealing with.
We find out that Woong is adopted, that he was abandoned by his father when he was really young and that Mr. and Mrs. Choi took him in as their own son after losing their own child.
We find out that Yeon Soo has a crippling inferiority complex that caused her to break up with Woong in the peak of their relationship because she felt like she didn’t deserve to be happy and carefree by herself as she was struggling with financial problems plus the care for her grandmother.
We find out that Ji Woong was (emotionally) neglected by his mother as a child and that’s caused him to emotionally distance himself from other people, even his closest friends. We also find out he’s been in love with Yeon Soo since the first time he saw her.
We find out that NJ is really lonely and doesn’t have any friends. She tries to keep up her reputation as well as possible but keeps slipping up and causing her management team problems when her true feelings keep coming out.
I guess you could say that the four main characters are all struggling with a certain type of loneliness/sadness. On a positive note, at the end of the series, they all learn to overcome it.

Let me dive a little deeper into the characters for starters.
Choi Woong. Where to begin with him. I find him a pretty complex character, actually, because he has way more layers than you’d expect. At first glance, he seems to live a life of leisure, he’s always been coddled by his parents as a kid, he’s been allowed to do whatever he wants and doesn’t have to worry about anything. He grew up being quite privileged, and all because the right couple found him. If he’d ended up somewhere else, his background might not have given him so much favoritism. I kept wondering how Woong truly felt about his upbringing, especially since he was aware of the fact that he was adopted. He never really talked about his feelings, not as a kid or as an adult, but it must have definitely left its invisible marks on him. From the outside, he seems so carefree and light (maybe a little socially awkward), but you wouldn’t guess that he would be carrying that kind of sadness with him. On the other hand, I find him quite mature as well. He’s very observant and you have to give him credit for being aware of so much more than he shows. Of course he also has a clumsy side, especially when it comes to romance and relationships, which makes him very relatable and likeable. But I just got the feeling that, even though he may have appeared indifferent, he knew exactly what was going on with everyone.
One problematic characteristic I found with Woong was that he put other people’s feelings before his own too often. For example, in the second to last episode, he got a harsh review on his exhibition, and Yeon Soo didn’t show up either so he felt really down about that. But then Ji Woong suddenly told him that he’d found out his mother was dying, and he found Yeon Soo crying on his doorstep asking him to comfort her because she was upset about her grandmother who had to be hospitalized. You could just see on his face that he wanted to tell her that he was also having a hard time, but he ended up just hugging and comforting her, putting her first. He never put his own feelings on top of everyone else’s if he deemed the others’ feelings heavier than his own.
I also feel like his lack of ambition, even as an artist, is an important part of his character development. He’s always just lived doing what he likes and drawing what he wants, but it still seems like he lacks a certain confidence in his work. He definitely enjoys making art and also puts in effort to organize exhibitions on occasion, but he still doesn’t truly see himself as all that. When he receives that review and also when his former art classmate now turned rival artist Nua (nice cameo by Kwak Dong Yeon) openly criticizes him for not actively going after him when he stole his work and accused him of plagiarism, Woong realizes they are right about him. He doesn’t even get angry, he doesn’t even stand up for himself, but you can just see the shocked realization on his face. It’s a really painful moment since you can just see his whole being crumble in uncertainty. Honestly, I found it a bit complicated to pinpoint what exactly his feelings towards drawing were, or if he even really wanted to be an artist. He seems to be struggling with this during the entirety of the series, even though he tries not to make a big deal out of it. He ultimately comes to the conclusion that he wants to attend a university in Paris where his favorite architect teaches, so I guess he does have a certain urge to learn more about architectural design and wants to get better at drawing and designing buildings. He may have felt himself being pushed into becoming an artist as it was the one thing he excelled at, even though during their dating period in high school he told Yeon Soo that he was planning on keeping his art as a hobby.

As for Yeon Soo, it seems like she struggled a bit with Woong’s lack of ambition as well when they first started dating. He didn’t have the plan to go to college or really start a career, while the main thing she was worried about was how to thrive economically. I guess the fact that they were polar opposites didn’t only pose a challenge for them to open up to each another when they first met, but it also kept creating wedges between them and Yeon Soo was definitely more conscious of this than Woong. In hindsight, I feel like she just really wanted him to find something that he genuinely wanted to do, because that’s also why she supports his decision to go to Paris. 
The reason she broke up with him after 5 years of dating had more to do with her own situation than with him. She was financially struggling and going through a rough patch and instead of including Woong in her worries so that he may have helped her, she decided to just let him go. I still don’t think it was fair of her to do it like that, not giving him any reason and just leaving him hanging. Of course she did tell him the real reason, but it was over the phone and Woong was drunk, plus he missed the important part, so it wasn’t a very successful make-up conversation. Anyways, so while I don’t agree with how she did it, I can imagine where she was coming from. She reflected on herself and acknowledged that it was because of her own lack of confidence and she didn’t want Woong to suffer along with her. This is also very typical of Yeon Soo, of what she’s always been like. Independent, not wanting to rely on others too much. The care for her grandmother had always been her number one priority, and she didn’t care if she had to give up her social life for that. With Woong things got more serious of course, but she still made her choice.  
She first meets Woong again after 5 years when her job requires her to get artist Go Oh on board with a collaboration and she visits his house. For the first period of time after they’re involuntarily reunited, the two treat each other with disdain, but it’s clear as day that both of them have lingering attachments. 
It was really touching to see how much Yeon Soo actually allowed herself to smile when she got back together with Woong, all those feelings that she’d been suppressing just came bursting back out and she finally allowed herself to accept all the love she was receiving. 
I think the most groundbreaking moment for Yeon Soo was when she had to decide whether or not to go to Paris, either with Woong or for her own work. Everyone kept telling her to just follow her heart and go live the life she wanted, but she realized there and then that that’s exactly what she’d been doing all along. While her mind had tricked her into thinking that she’d always been alone, she was actually never alone at all, she’d always been surrounded by supportive people. By reflecting on that, she was able to break out of her own (imagined?) loneliness and that’s also how she finally realized what she wanted to do. 
When Woong and Yeon Soo both break out of their cycles, it’s like they’re finally free from invisible chains. Everything suddenly seems possible again and they even make their long distance relationship work. 

Kim Ji Woong made a 180 degree turn from what he seemed like to me in the webtoon. While I did suspect there was something about the way he eyed Woong and Yeon Soo, especially after they started dating, but he never caused a scene and never said anything about it so I wasn’t sure what it was about. I do feel like the writers chose the more predictable option of making him in love with Yeon Soo.
Ji Woong is one of the most interesting characters to me since, even as the male lead’s best friend, he doesn’t always appear to be very sympathetic, per se. He seems very emotionally closed off from other people, even his closest friends and colleagues, and he also shows a sharp, sarcastic side at times.
He bottles up his feelings the most out of everyone, and at one point it became a bit frustrating to me. So many people reached out to him, but he never accepted any help. I’m glad he was able to resolve his whole situation in the end, even with his mother, but it certainly took him a lot of internalizing and shutting himself off from everyone else to get there. I kept wondering why he would do this to himself, filming Woong and Yeon Soo, even though part of him must’ve subconsciously wanted to keep them away from each other. He knew there was tension between them, but he also knew there was a chance they might make up again. I’m not entirely sure what his intentions were, if he was planning on shooting his shot with Yeon Soo himself or not. I did feel very sorry for him when he found out that they were dating again because it CRUSHED him. It was so painful to see Yeon Soo trying to cheer him up and not being aware of anything, while you could see it was killing him inside because he really needed some time to get over her and he couldn’t even tell her what was going on. That was really rough. 
In general, I think Ji Woong’s personality is justifiable when you take a look at his upbringing. His adapted habit to emotionally distance himself from people was undoubtedly caused by his mother. She basically ignored him throughout his childhood, she always came home late and would then scold him for staying up to wait for her. When he wanted to talk about his day, she’d just shut him up by saying she was tired and eventually she even told him that if it weren’t for him, she wouldn’t be living ‘such a pathetic life’. She blamed her own misfortune on her child. Now we don’t get the whole picture, we don’t know what happened to her, what kind of life she was living or how Ji Woong lost his father, for example. Maybe being a single mom took its toll on her? Anyways, the way she treated him, especially as a young child, was not okay. And then, not only does she suddenly come back to reconnect with him, she out of the blue tells him she’s dying. Not only that, she wants him to film her because she doesn’t want to die without leaving a mark. I mean… I get that that really messed with Ji Woong’s head. She hadn’t been there his entire life. Because of her absence, he’d felt like he was different. He didn’t have something that all the other kids had, and even other classmates with only one parent seemed to still be really close with that parent. He just couldn’t understand why it was different in his case, all the more when he saw how Woong’s mom treated him. He became more like a son to Woong’s family than to his own mother. Although I understand his resentment towards her and how his upbringing has made him so reluctant to express his affection to others, I was glad that he eventually talked with his mom and decided to feature in her documentary, as his mentor Park Dong Il took over the production.
In Ji Woong’s production team there’s also Jung Chae Ran (played by Jeon Hye Won), who also works on the documentary with him. She’s quite straightforward in her communication and the running joke is that she’s becoming a lot like Ji Woong in personality. Chae Ran has a crush on Ji Woong and is very hurt by seeing how he gets in his unrequited feelings for Yeon Soo. She’s the main person that keeps worrying about him, keeps reminding him to eat and sleep well, even though he usually just waves her good intentions away. However, after Ji Woong finally resolves all his stuff with his mother and gets over Yeon Soo for good, Chae Ran confesses to him quite casually and even though he doesn’t give her an immediate answer, it does seem like he appreciates it. 

NJ is to this point still a bit of an enigma to me. She wasn’t in the webtoon, so her character was created specifically for the drama series and I keep thinking about her character’s true purpose. She’s a celebrity, although now that I think about it, it’s never actually specified what kind of celebrity she is (an idol, an actress, etc.). We just see her in backstage situations where she’s allowed to take a break and have her own thoughts. However, she has no one else to share these thoughts with. She becomes fascinated by Go Oh’s drawings and as she’s just bought a building (or more?) herself, she wants him to draw her building. As she keeps approaching him, she falls for him, but when it turns out not to be mutual, she doesn’t become petty. On the contrary, she really tries to reel herself in and when she does slip up and makes a petty remark, she immediately reflects on it humorously. In her solo scenes where she’s alone at home thinking about Woong and why he’s not calling her back, she acts like a normal K-Drama girl in love. It’s quite endearing to see that ‘normal’ side of her. Other than that, we don’t really get to know much about NJ in terms of how she became a celebrity or how she grew up or anything like that. She’s just a celebrity, and a slightly problematic one, from what I gather. She is dealing with a lot of rumors and scandals and her agency team keeps getting thrown around for things she does and says, but I think it’s a good thing that she speaks up about these things. For example, that part where she organized a volunteer trash-picking event for people that posted nasty stuff about her on the Internet and she overhears them talking about her behind her back even though they’d all been sucking up to her to drop the charges – these people were shameful and when she confronted them they kept turning it all back onto her. It’s crazy that people can act like that and say harmful things to a celebrity, but as a celebrity you just need to suck it up. You can never act the same way and you’re not even allowed to confront disrespectful people that spread nasty rumors about you. NJ has completely accepted that this is her life, that she is not able to have any friends because of her line of work and that she’ll never have a ‘normal’ life in which she can do or say what she wants. But she does go out of her way, heck she even skips schedules, to go see Woong and when an article is published claiming that the two of them are dating, even though she critiques her agency for not putting an immediate end to the rumors (they think it’s good publicity), she doesn’t go out of her way to help the rumor out of the world either. 
All in all, just like with Ji Woong, even though NJ was definitely not a bad person, I still had some trouble finding her 100% sympathetic at times. I think it just has to do with the fact that I couldn’t pinpoint what exactly her intentions were, either. On the one hand she seemed to be friendly enough, but there was something about her, something she was not saying, something that went deeper than the surface that we didn’t get to fully explore. So that’s why I’m still calling her an enigma, she’s still a bit of a mystery to me. 

The point I want to make about the above four main characters is that they all had similar issues. They all had double layers, double intentions and they all had a habit of hiding how they truly felt and keeping quiet about what they really wanted to do. Which makes for an interesting, but also complex group dynamic.
Looking at it like that, I’d say Eun Ho and Sol Yi were definitely the most uncomplicated characters of the series and they succeeded in lightening the mood for the others as well.
Goo Eun Ho was Woong’s junior in art school (if I remember correctly) and he also regularly helped out in Woong’s parents’ restaurants. He’s kind of a comic relief character in the show, he’s very open with his emotions and in that way he stands in very stark contrast to Woong and also to Ji Woong. When the series starts ten years later after the OG documentary, Eun Ho is probably the person closest to Woong as he is in his house a lot of the time. Eun Ho is a big fan of NJ, so he keeps fanboying over her and begs Woong to do more collabs with her too. He’s also the one person worrying about Woong after the review comes out, the one person expressing that Woong is the one that needs to be comforted the most. 
Lee Sol Yi went to college together with Yeon Soo and they’ve been close friends since. I loved that, when Yeon Soo realized that she’d never truly been alone, in all of the flashbacks she had, Sol Yi was there. She’s kind of a tough love ‘eonni’ to Yeon Soo and even to Eun Ho, as she’s older than them both. Through their contribution to the new documentary, Eun Ho and Sol Yi get more involved with the protagonists, there are more meetings at Sol Yi’s bar and Eun Ho even starts helping her out with her business. In the end, the two of them start dating each other as well.

I would like to give another special mention to Woong’s parents, Choi Ho and Choi Yeon Ok. Because seriously, this drama just set the standard for the perfect parents HIGH. They were SO incredibly warm and loving, and I loved their silliness together as a married couple. Even when it turns out that his mother knew all along that Woong knew that he was adopted, she never treated him any differently because to her, he was her real son. This again forms a paradox with the parent-son relationship that Ji Woong and his mother (Park Mi Hyun) have as he wasn’t even treated like her real son even though he was. But yeah, Woong was definitely very lucky to end up in such a good household. 

Yeon Soo’s grandmother (Cha Mi Kyung) was also a nice supporting character in the show, and I’m glad nothing too bad happened to her before the end. I found her interesting because she also wasn’t a one-dimensional character. She had a lot of worries about Yeon Soo and she wanted her granddaughter to not only live for or like her. I liked that she’d just immediately taken Yeon Soo’s side in the breakup, and then after Yeon Soo told her she was the one who broke up with Woong, that she’d been the one to hurt him, she was still kind of tsundere about it, haha. I loved the scenes where she and Woong were alone and Woong was just a puppy on edge to every single movement she made. Of course she would always stand by Yeon Soo, but I’m glad she didn’t let it cloud her judgment too much, you could tell she secretly liked Woong and she was rooting for them. 

Lastly, I wanted to mention some final minor characters that I liked, namely Yeon Soo’s colleagues at work (Heo Joon Seok, Park Yeon Woo, Yoon Sang Jung and Cha Seung Yeop) and Im Tae Hoon (nicknamed ‘IMtern’ by Ji Woong), the intern at the documentary team. Imtern (Lee Seung Woo) really stole my heart, haha, I felt so bad for him that he got on Ji Woong’s team as he was having NONE of it. 

Before I go on to my cast comments, I want to briefly say something about the relationship dynamic between Woong and Yeon Soo. I wanted to make a special mention of it since in my last review of Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha, I was thrown off by how much the characters’ personalities seemed to change as soon as they confirmed their feelings for each other and started dating. After that I guess I just started paying more attention to it, lol. In this drama, even though the two main characters definitely became brighter when they got back together, I never once felt like they were acting out of character. They were honestly so adorable together. The way they reconnected was just really natural and cutely awkward, especially considering they’d been a couple before. I think it poses quite the challenge to act like you’re getting back into old feelings for someone that you used to have a 5-year long relationship with, but when it happened there was no doubt in the world that they’d never truly given up on what they felt for each other. So in this case I would say, mission accomplished, relationship dynamic approved! 

I believe I have mentioned most of what I wanted to discuss regarding the main characters and the story, I’m not sure if it was too short but if I remember more I’ll add it later. Now on to the cast comments before I conclude with some final remarks.

Honestly, Choi Woo Shik outdid himself in this role. Apart from Parasite I don’t think I’ve seen him in a main lead role before, but this role was MADE for him. It made me see him in a completely different light. He balanced the different sides of Woong so well, and I was really impressed with his unexpected ability to change his expressions so subtly yet so significantly. During the scene where Nua told him that he pitied him, at some point there was this sudden change in his gaze and it gave me goosebumps. At first I thought he was getting angry, but it turns out that that was a look of unmistaken but still shocking realization that he experienced. Anyways, I really loved him in this series, he was amazing and so was his chemistry with Yeon Soo’s actress. Other things I’ve seen him in include Rooftop Prince, Fated to Love You, Fight For My Way and The Package and yeah, Parasite. To think it’s been 4 years since his last drama, though! He’s been doing more movies lately, apparently.

I’ve only seen Kim Da Mi before in Itaewon Class, and these are the only two drama series she’s done so far. I was wondering how she would be since her iconic performance in Itaewon Class, and I have to say that it was very nice to see a brighter side to her, but also to see her portray multiple layers. I remember not really finding her character in Itaewon Class very sympathetic, to the point where I wasn’t even feeling the ship of her with the male lead, but in this drama she occasionally melted my heart. She’s so cute and her face is so tiny!! I liked how she managed to balance those different sides, and with that her character’s development from stern and serious high school student to a more mature adult who was able to reflect on her own behavior from the past. I really liked her performance here.

Not me realizing that Kim Sung Chul is Ipsaeng from Arthdal Chronicles! I love seeing actors I know from Arthdal as modern-time people in other series, haha, it creates such a weird paradox. Other than that I haven’t seen him in any other drama series yet, but who knows when I’ll get to see more of him! Compared to Ipsaeng, Ji Woong was like the total opposite kind of character. He was serious and detached and as I said, at times I wasn’t really sure if I 100% liked him or not. But I think most of it really had to do with his neglectful upbringing and he turned out well enough in the end. It was interesting to see him act so differently from what I’d seen of him before! 

I haven’t seen anything of Noh Jung Eui before, I just see she was Park Shin Hye’s younger version in Pinocchio, but that’s too long ago for me to remember. She seemed so familiar to me, though, I really thought I knew her from something else. Anyways, as I’ve mentioned, I still have some question marks around NJ’s character. She was definitely just as multi-layered as the other characters, but in her case I never really became certain of her intentions. On the one hand it seemed like she was struggling with her life as a celebrity, but on the other hand it also partially felt like she was imposing on herself the ideas that she couldn’t have any friends, because even if you’re a celebrity, you can still have friends as far as I know, it’s not against the rules or anything, right? Anyways, she hid her loneliness mostly with humor, especially towards Woong, so it wasn’t always clear how serious she was being. In the end, I believe she also made up her mind to start following her own heart, but I’m not sure what exactly that meant to her in terms of actual plans. I’ll keep saying it, she’s a bit of an enigma!

I hadn’t seen anything with Ahn Dong Goo yet either, but some of his dramas are still on my to watch list. I guess he’s only been starring in drama series starting from 2019, so he’s quite the new face! I liked Eun Ho a lot, he really brought in a fresh breeze and always made the people around him feel comfortable. His dynamic with Woong was also very funny, as they had such a stark contrast. I liked that, even when he seemed like a fool to Sol Yi in the beginning, he did eventually prove himself to be really reliable and cool, without even changing anything about himself. It just takes getting to know someone, I guess! 

At this point, Park Jin Joo is just a classic addition to any drama. She seems to be in almost every Netflix K-Drama I watch these days! I know her from The Girl Who Sees Smells, Jealousy Incarnate, Reunited Worlds, While You Were Sleeping, Encounter, It’s Okay to Not Be Okay, Lovestruck in the City and she’s also done a lot of cameos. She still hasn’t gotten rid of the ‘best friend’ role curse, though, I believe it should be time for her to become her own female lead – she’s such an icon. And even though I’ve already seen her in so many different series, she still surprised me here. Like, I still feel like she showed something new and that’s pretty impressive.

Park Won Sang always gets the friendly father role as far as I know, I know him from Dream High, Healer, W – Two Worlds, Fantastic, Weightlifting Fairy Kim Bok Joo, Wife I Know and The King: Eternal Monarch (honestly, who WASN’T in The King). But he was a really funny and loveable dad in Our Beloved Summer as well, I loved how he and his wife never even blinked or shared a look as they thought back on adopting Woong, it was just meant to be for them. 

As I’ve mentioned in many a review before, Seo Jung Yeon has become one of my favorite middle-aged lady actresses. She just ALWAYS delivers, from minor to main role. I keep repeating the list, but she appeared in Valid Love, She Was Pretty, Descendants of the Sun, Moonlight Drawn by Clouds, Bride of the Water God, Come and Hug Me, Melting Me Softly, The King: Eternal Monarch, Run On, and a whole bunch of stuff I still want to watch. I couldn’t help but love the heck out of her as Woong’s mom in this drama. That scene at the end when Woong realized she knew that he knew about the adoption and there was nothing but pure love in her eyes as she looked at him and they ended up just bawling it out together T^T I just love her.

I haven’t seen anything with Jo Bok Rae before, but he also seems very familiar to me. Maybe I will see him in another drama in the future. Anyways, I liked how they kept his character on the side in this series, because of course he had a much more apparent role in the webtoon. I like how he became more goofy, as I remember his character from the webtoon being a bit more worrying about everything mapping out the way it was planned. But I liked that he became a real mentor to Ji Woong, even though he acted a bit silly sometimes. He was initially the person that kept him on the team no matter how many complaints they got about Ji Woong in the beginning when he was still inexperienced, and he was also one of the people reaching out to him when it became clear he was struggling with something. I think it was a nice gesture that he ended up shooting the documentary about Ji Woong’s mom so that Ji Woong himself could also be in it. 

I really liked Jeon Hye Won in this drama, Chae Ran was like the voice of reason that Ji Woong tried to block out for a long time but then couldn’t ignore in the end. It was really refreshing to have such a straightforward female character in the background who didn’t get too emotional but just remained practical until the end. Apparently she was in Because This Is My First Life, too! I’m also going to see her again in some other shows in the future, so I’m excited for that! 

I haven’t seen a lot of things with Cha Mi Kyung either, but I do see a couple of drama titles that are on my list. She also does a lot of movies, apparently. Anyways, I liked her as Yeon Soo’s grandmother. She wasn’t a typical grandmother who just approved of everything or who was just always nice to everyone. She had multiple layers as well and I really liked the dynamic between grandmother and granddaughter as well. They loved each other deeply, but Yeon Soo was definitely more affectionate towards her. Grandmother would frown and scoff but you could tell how much she loved her as well. She was a good judge of character, too. 

And of course I want to mention Kwak Dong Yeon AND Kang Ki Doong for their continuous iconic guest appearances. Kang Ki Doong’s appearance as Sol Yi’s ex-boyfriend was extra funny because we know that they are really close friends in real life. It just made for a very enjoyable moment. For Kwak Dong Yeon, I’m actually used to more eccentric roles from him, so it was interesting to see him as a very serious guest actor for once. These guys will just never disappoint.

Oh, before I forget! There was this guy that Yeon Soo was working with in the beginning, the person who urged her to get artist Go Oh on board. I actually initially thought he would get a much bigger role. I even thought that he would become like a love rival or something, but he just disappeared after two or three episodes. I was just reminded of him when I saw the cast list and I was like OH RIGHT THAT GUY. He was played by Lee Joon Hyuk and he also looked really familiar to me. And then I found out he was in Are You Human, Too? and I remember that I indeed wrote about him in my review that I hadn’t seen anything with him before. Well, now I remember him from something! 

Closing remarks! So yeah, I’m glad I finished this drama. It wasn’t a very spectacular series in terms of events and action, as I mentioned before, but that just gave more space to explore the main characters more deeply. I can personally place this drama in the same kind of category as Run On, mainly because of its healing message. All the characters were very humane and had good and bad personality traits. The typical thing was that they all took on their issues all by themselves without asking for (or even accepting) help and that they had to learn that it was okay to share and reach out. I thought it was nice how all of them managed to break free from their own invisible chains at the end, because it made such a big difference. I also liked the main couple, their chemistry together was really cute. It’s the kind of drama that not everyone will like, probably, but I did enjoy it. It may not have been the most thrilling thing I’ve seen, but I can still appreciate it for its simple and strong message. I would say it’s about letting go, as well as about letting people in at the right time. About dealing with loneliness/sadness and about not ignoring what the heart wants. 

This was for now the last drama that I pushed up on my list because I couldn’t wait to watch it. From now on I’m going back to my original watch list, which also includes some more Japanese and Chinese series, so I’m excited to mix it up again! Gotta love K-Drama, but sometimes it’s also nice to have a ‘change of scenery’, so to say. In the meantime I’ve also been watching multiple other non-Asian stuff on Netflix, so my watch schedule is tight!
Can’t wait to start on the next drama on my list. 

I’ll be back~ 

Disclaimer: this is a review, and as such it contains spoilers of the whole series. Please proceed to read at your own risk if you still plan on watching this show or if you haven’t finished it yet. You have been warned.

Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha
(갯마을 차차차 / Gaenmaeul Chachacha)
MyDramaList rating: 7.0/10

Hey there! It’s new review time~ As I mentioned in my last review, I decided to catch up with some more recent drama releases before continuing with my own list, and this is item number two! I was really excited to see this as soon as I saw it came out, because I really like Shin Min Ah and Kim Sun Ho and was eager to see them in a romance drama together. I’m glad I pushed it forward on my list, because it was a nice start-of-summer drama. Sometimes you just need to watch something that matches the season you’re currently in, you know? It just puts you in the summer holiday mood, it makes you want to take a trip to the countryside to clear your head and maybe even find an unexpected gem along your journey that will bring you a beautiful memory. That’s the vibe that I got from this drama and I’m excited to share my ideas and thoughts on it. So, let’s get started!


I will say right off the bat that I found this a super relaxing and healing drama to watch, mostly because of the beautiful seaside village sceneries. It just made me want to be there and take a stroll along the ocean or a hike up into the mountains. The opening sequence song also set the mood every single time, I never skipped it even once. The happy melody, the depictions of the daily life that the protagonists would experience in the village, it just put a smile on my face. I went into it without any expectations because I didn’t know what the story would be about, and it was nice to just watch everything unfold. In the end I think I can say that the story isn’t just about the main leads, but about all the people living in the village, and in a more general sense, about life as a whole.

Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha is a 16-episode Netflix K-Drama with each episode lasting about 1 hour and 20 minutes. The main story is about Yoon Hye Jin (played by Shin Min Ah), a dentist who works at a practice in Seoul. However, when she can’t see eye to eye with her employer anymore, she quits and then finds it hard to find work elsewhere in the city because said employer spreads bad rumors about her. Shortly after she quits, Hye Jin decides to drive out to Gongjin Village for her mother’s death anniversary, as she visited the beach there with both her parents when she was a child. After arriving in Gongjin, things suddenly all start working against her and she’s forced to stay the night as all ATMs are broken down as well as her car and she’s lost one of her shoes on the beach (it was taken away by the tide). She also keeps bumping into the village handyman, Chief Hong (played by Kim Sun Ho), but as he’s not extremely helpful towards her and just encourages her to work in order to make money, even for just that day, she’s reluctant to keep asking for his help. But her forced stay in Gongjin does leave an impression on her, especially after she’s informed that there is a no local dental practice. Since there are many elderly people living there who could definitely use some dental care, it’s very inconvenient for them to travel to the nearest one in the city, and when Hye Jin returns to Seoul, she makes up her mind to move to Gongjin within a day. She is joined shortly afterwards by her best friend Pyo Mi Seon (played by Gong Min Jung), who also works as a dental assistant. The two city women start a dental practice, and consequently a new life together in Gongjin Village.
The story basically followes both Hye Jin and Mi Seon as they get used to the village life. While the slowburn between Hye Jin and Chief Hong builds up, Mi Seon also finds herself falling for a local police officer, Choi Eun Chul (played by Kang Hyung Suk) and they also get their own romantic storyline. Finally, there’s also the storylines of several villagers who all have their own (daily) struggles to deal with.

Let me make an overview of the main villagers.
First of all, there’s the three Gongjin Grandmothers, Mrs. Kim Gam Ri, Mrs. Lee Mat Yi and Mrs. Park Sook Ja (played by Kim Young Ok, Lee Yong Yi and Shin Shin Ae). The three of them are usually seen together. Mat Yi and Sook Ja are usually bickering together while Gam Ri, the eldest, is more calm and refrains from getting into too much hassle. Gam Ri has been like a real grandmother to Chief Hong ever since his own grandfather passed away, and she always manages to steal the hearts of everyone new coming to Gongjin because of her pureness and the fact that she always welcomes and makes food for everyone.
Then there’s Oh Chun Jae, stage-named ‘Oh Yoon’ (Jo Han Chul), a single dad and former musician now turned café owner with lingering attachments to his performing days, and his teenage daughter Joo Ri (Kim Min Seo). He lost his wife when Joo Ri was very young and still misses her.
Then there’s Yeo Hwa Jung (Lee Bong Ryun), the zone chief who provides Hye Jin with the estate arrangement of her new house and dental practice in Gongjin. She also runs a seafood restaurant. Her ex-husband Jang Yeong Gook (In Gyo Jin) works at the town hall. They have a son together, Yi Joon (Ki Eun Yoo), who is incredibly mature and smart for his age. The true reason for their divorce is one of the three main mysteries of Gongjin. At the start of the series, their former college friend (and Yeong Gook’s first love) Yoo Cho Hee (Hong Ji Hee) returns to the village as an elementary school teacher and this creates even more friction between the ex-couple.
Then there’s Jo Nam Sook (Cha Chung Hwa), a restaurant owner with a very nosy and eccentric disposition, who’s always at the center of gossip in the village. She actually lost her young daughter due to cancer (I believe) and regularly makes donations to children’s hospitals in her memory.
Then there’s a young married couple, Choi Geum Chul (Yoon Suk Hyun) and his wife Yoon Kyung (Kim Joo Yeon) who is pregnant with their second child. They already have one daughter Bo Ra (Go Do Yeon), who is classmates and best friends with Yi Joon. Geum Chul is also the brother of police officer Eun Chul and he works at the village hardware store while his wife runs the small local supermarket.

So yes, there’s a whole bunch of people to meet in Gongjin and yes, all of their stories are covered in this series. It might seem like a lot to put into 16 episodes, but in hindsight I think they did a really good job with that. Overall I think it’s safe to say that by the end of the series, everyone’s story got concluded, and all in a good way.
It’s funny, because I initially thought that the story would really be about Hye Jin, how she would break from her slightly snobby city girl mindset and really find a new side to herself as she starts to adapt to life in the seaside village, but it turns out to be about so much more than that. It’s about everyone, really. Every single character’s life and story is significant.

Let me talk a bit more about the main characters. First of all, Yoon Hye Jin. As I mentioned, she decides on a whim to leave her familiar and material life in Seoul behind and moves to Gongjin Village to start her own dental practice there. This in itself is already quite characteristic of her. As she herself says at some point, she always makes very well-considered choices in a short period of time since she doesn’t have a lot of patience and doesn’t like waiting. She always needs to know where she stands and what needs to be done. Apart from her mother’s death when she was still young, she doesn’t seem to have any major emotional baggage from her past. She’s not really close with her father, who remarried and managed to move on with his life, but she also doesn’t really have a lot of close friends except for Mi Seon. She doesn’t have a lot to leave behind, so to say, which probably makes her decision to leave Seoul easier. When she arrives in Gongjin and meets Chief Hong for the first time, they really don’t get along very well – in fact, they seem to be polar opposites. Chief Hong is incredibly social and gets along with everyone in the village because of his cheerful and informal behavior towards everyone, regardless of age, gender, etcetera. Hye Jin is a really pragmatic and rational city woman who does not tend to be very affectionate or friendly per se towards people she meets for the first time. She’s initially pretty distant, and has a kind of ‘prim and proper’ vibe. For her, it suffices to just greet someone with a polite smile, she doesn’t feel the need to immediately mingling into her neighbors’ business. Her behavior stands in stark contrast with Chief Hong’s, and we also see this in her father when he comes to visit her one time – he gets very insulted by the casual and informal way in which Chief Hong treats him. From the first episode on, we are inclined to believe that Hye Jin will not easily get used to living in the countryside, given by her frustration with the lack of conveniences. There’s no fast solution to her car problem, she can’t use an ATM, the coffee isn’t to her taste, etc. She also initially seems to look down on the village people a bit. Still, it doesn’t take her long to decide it will be worthwhile to move there. The initial reason may be just money, as she sees a business opportunity and grabs it, but she gradually grows to care for the village people in her own way. Mi Seon seems to be much better at the mingling part, but Hye Jin always keeps a bit of a distance, it seems. She only becomes affectionate once she and Chief Hong become an item, and I will get to that later because that is a whole different story.

Chief Hong, or Hong Doo Shik, has lived in Gongjin his entire life. He grew up there, he lived there with his grandfather after his parents passed away, and he only left to study at Seoul National University. After graduating, there is a mysterious 5-year gap before he returned to Gongjin by himself. No one knows what happened to him in those 5 years, but something significant must have happened because when he came back he had turned into a completely different person, gloomy and listless. He only turned into the lively and cheerful area chief that we are introduced to because the villagers made sure he got involved in all the work in the village. They kept asking him to help out with chores and such, and this in turn made him an indispensable part of the community. When Hye Jin arrives, someone new who has difficulty warming up to the village and its people by herself, Doo Shik decides to help her with that in his own way.
Despite his initial firm behavior towards her, she piques his interest from the moment they meet on the beach for the first time. He first sees a lot of sadness in her eyes, but then he also sees her smile very widely as she interacts with the people she meets in the village.
After Hye Jin moves to Gongjin, he keeps calling on her to attempt to get her to participate in village activities such as cleaning the neighborhood, all because he wants her to get involved and get to know the people better. There are a few times when he gets disappointed with her, moments where he feels that she really is just a conservative city woman who won’t be able to change her ways that easily. But he himself always winds up coming back, he always forgives her because that’s his nature. He has become the kind of person who is really easy-going, easy to deal with, and he doesn’t make too big of a deal about awkward situations with people. He seems to be such a carefree person, always rooting for other people, but you can see clearly that he’s also never actually committing to any personal relationships that go too deep. He keeps everyone at a safe, easy to deal with distance so that there won’t be any unpleasant situations which can’t be solved over a nice talk or meal. I will talk more about Doo Shik’s unresolved trauma later, because that also deserves it’s own paragraph of coverage.

In any case, it’s safe to say that Hye Jin and Doo Shik are polar opposites when they meet on the beach. They both have completely different mindsets and they just can’t seem to get on the same wavelength (pun intended) in the beginning. But that also immediately makes for a specific kind of tension between them, in which you can sense that they’re actually more interested in each other than they wish to show. Just as they start to warm up to each other more, we are introduced to Ji Seung Hyun (played by Lee Sang Yi), Hye Jin’s former college senior who is now a successful variety show director. He initially comes to Gongjin because he gets lost on the road, but is then captivated by the beautiful scenery and decides to shoot his next show there to promote the beauty of Gongjin to the rest of the country. He coincidentally meets Doo Shik, who mistakes him for a lost tourist and misinterprets that he makes amateur mukbang videos. Still, the two somehow manage to get along pretty well. They are both quite open-minded and are more amused by their differences than that they start an argument about them. Seung Hyun happens to see Hye Jin there and, as he’s had a crush on her since college but never got the chance to confess, he sees this as his second chance, as stroke of destiny, even. However, at this point the slowburn between Hye Jin and Doo Shik is already in full throttle, and even though Hye Jin did like Seung Hyun at some point and is still very fond of him, she is not able to return his feelings. He deals with it very well, he doesn’t get petty, and he just tells Doo Shik to take care of her and not make her cry. He accepts his defeat like a real man, and that also makes him a very sympathetic character. He still remains by Hye Jin’s side as a true and loyal friend, and even when things between the main couple get shaky for a moment, he never tries to get an opportunity to still win her for himself, he just tells Doo Shik to not make him regret accepting Hye Jin’s rejection. In his own storyline, he is working on his show which they film at Mrs. Gam Ri’s house, he frequently moves back and forth from Seoul. At the end he returns to Gongjin to watch the premiere of the show with all the villagers.
I honestly cannot remember the last time I felt so at ease with a love triangle like this, in which they all just felt so comfortable around each other and it didn’t get awkward after the third person was rejected. In the end, Seung Hyun becomes aware of the feelings his colleague writer Wang Ji Won (Park Ye Young) has for him and ends up with her.

I feel like I really need to start on addressing the elephant in the room: Doo Shik’s past. Not gonna lie, I was quite surprised to learn that the emotional depth of this series came from him. In a way, it was rather refreshing that there was not a lot of emotional heaviness in this drama, and even the female protagonist wasn’t holding on to too much baggage herself. Chief Hong, however, definitely had his baggage, and a lot of that. I guess you could call him the perfect example of someone who you’d never think struggled with mental health issues. He always seems to be so cheerful and carefree, but then in-between we see shots of him in which he has nightmares of being all alone in the dark, in which he visits a doctor and takes pills. We only find out what really happened in the 5-year gap in Seoul after a member of Seung Hyun’s film crew recognizes Doo Shik’s name and suddenly punches him in front of everyone, blaming him for “what he did to his father back in Seoul”.
Long story short: Doo Shik lost his college senior and best friend Park Jung Woo (Oh Ui Shik) shortly after his graduation from university in Seoul. Jung Woo was like an older brother to him after his grandfather passed away and he even persuaded Doo Shik to come work with him at an asset investment company, although Doo Shik wasn’t really interested at first. Anyways, due to a major issue (I don’t know anything about asset investment so please don’t ask me to repeat exactly what happened) the stock rates dropped and a lot of their clients ended up losing money. The father of that film crew member was a security guard at that company at the time and Doo Shik had given him advice on what he might invest in, but he also specifically warned him not to make any rash decisions. The father ended up betting on the wrong horse and lost his entire investment while he’d already taken out a loan and everything. When Doo Shik heard that the man had attempted suicide, he and Jung Woo went there in a hurry and got into a car accident on the way, which killed Jung Woo. Doo Shik has always blamed himself for his death since the situation was something he caused.
But that’s not all. His trauma was caused even more heavily because of other people blaming everything on him. In desperate situations, people just need someone to blame, even though rationally they know it’s not directly that person’s fault. They might come to see that after a while, but in the heat of the moment it’s just easy to have someone to get angry at. Doo Shik unfortunately just happened to be that person on several occasions. Throughout his life, he somehow always became the person to blame for others. When his parents died, when his grandfather died, and then when his best friend died. His best friend’s wife even told him, in the heat of her grief, that she wished he’d died instead of her husband. And then that film crew member also blames him for causing his father to become paralyzed (in his suicide attempt, I suppose). Even though they all came to see clearly that it wasn’t directly Doo Shik’s fault after processing their grievances, they never actually went out of their way to apologize for what they’d said to him. So as a result, Doo Shik has always carried this immense guilt with him. The guilt of being involved in these situations caused him to start believing that he was indeed responsible for the deaths and misfortunes of these people, and this is why it’s hard for him to fully commit to a relationship of his own that goes beyond casual friendship. He just genuinely doesn’t believe he deserves to be loved like that. He’s always afraid something will happen and it’s incredibly hard for him to talk about, as expected.
However, when Hye Jin comes into his life and they find that their feelings for each other are mutual, it becomes so clear that he has been waiting for something like this, for someone that he can just wholeheartedly embrace without restraint, someone that supports him and is always on his side to hug him at any given moment. He knows he won’t be able to escape his issues, that they will come back to haunt him at some point, but before that happens it’s so clear as day that he wants to savour every single moment of his relationship with Hye Jin. He just wants to enjoy the feeling of being loved like that, and that’s really endearing. It was good that at least in the beginning, he was able to admit to his feelings for her and really didn’t hold back, even when he hadn’t told her about his issues yet. And even after Hye Jin finds out that there are things he is not telling her, she doesn’t give up on him. She does give him an ultimatum, she tells him that she is willing to wait for him if he just promises her that he will eventually talk to her. It’s okay if it’s not right away, but she needs to just know that he will come to her at some point, and that she knows it’ll have merit for her to wait for him – her pragmatic side popping up again. But this does give him the momentum he needs to eventually tell her everything. Even though the way they clashed when she finds out something’s not okay with him had me feeling a little uncomfortable, it was nice to see that she was thinking of both of them already at that point, she didn’t just get pointlessly mad at him. She really emphasized that they should just take a break until he’d be ready to talk, and as soon as he was ready, she was there to listen. I think that the maturity in that, the confidence that Hye Jin had already established in their relationship, was definitely significant in what saved them. She’d already decided that she was going to accept anything he was going to say, as long as he would just be honest with her.

This conveniently brings me to my next point: Hye Jin’s and Doo Shik’s romance dynamic. As we’ve established, all in all Hye Jin is a quite conservative woman. She tends to hold back a lot, she’s not very affectionate, and used to be a real goody-two-shoes proper student in college. She’s always been well-behaved and mature for her age ever since her father became listless after her mother died. She had to grow up fast and learn to take care of herself from a young age on.
It was exciting for me to imagine what she and Doo Shik would be like when they’d fall in love. I was really curious to see what the dynamic of their relationship as a couple would be like once their slowburn exploded. They both seemed to be holding back so much at some point, that they would either jump on each other, or they would just be really adorably awkward together when they’d finally confess their mutual feelings. Either way, I was definitely waiting for an explosion of feelings and was eager to see what their first kiss would be like (not counting Hye Jin’s drunk kiss at Doo Shik’s house, of course).
However, things unfolded in a way I definitely did NOT expect. First of all, the fact that they both just transformed into two love-crazy teenagers. Especially Hye Jin, she just became a completely different person. From the prim and proper conservative city woman, she just turned into a child. A very needy and cringingly affectionate child. Doo Shik also became very affectionate, but also very accommodating to the point of where I went, “you know, you’re allowed to find this too much too soon, my guy”. I just really didn’t know what to think of their behavior as a couple but I can’t lie and say that it never made me a little uncomfortable. At some moments I cringed. VERY hard. The scene that got me cringing the most was definitely the tooth brushing scene, I mean… that was just too much for me.
The moment I found Hye Jin most insufferable was when she created that bucket list of all the things she wanted them to do together, but then actually pushed him to do every single list item with her within a single day. Like, what was her hurry? It wasn’t as if they had limited time together, why was she in such a rush? And then she got all pouty and childish when he expressed that he was tired, I mean, can you blame him?? I don’t know, they suddenly just started acting so out of character, especially Hye Jin, and it threw me off a little. I also hadn’t expected to see that side from Doo Shik, as he was such a practical, casual guy in the beginning. It doesn’t happen often, but I think that in this case, I actually liked their dynamic during the slowburn build-up to their confession better than what they became like after they’d confirmed their mutual feelings. During the slowburn, we already see glimpses of how Doo Shik catches Hye Jin off guard, she shows him many clumsy and awkward moments of herself, but that was nice because you could see they were starting to feel more comfortable around each other as friends. If you watch the first episode and see their dynamic there, it’s impossible to imagine that 10 episodes later, they’ll be taking cheesy couple pictures in high school uniforms together.
What makes me link this paragraph with the previous one is the fact that I had some mixed feelings about their relationship dynamic during the period in which Doo Shik was struggling the most. Of course Hye Jin didn’t know anything about Doo Shik’s unresolved mental health issues at first, so I can’t blame her a 100% for being a bit negligent, but at some point it just seemed to me that she wanted to make Doo Shik fit into her own image of perfect romance so badly that she actually forgot to check properly if he was on the same page with her. I mean, it was obvious that they both loved each other very much, but if she’d paid a bit more attention to him, she would’ve noticed that it really was too much too soon for her to already bring up marriage and children to him. They hadn’t even talked about any of that yet and there she was already, proclaiming that she was dreaming of starting a family with him after JUST dating for a couple of weeks. I was not surprised that he was startled by that. Of course, it was characteristic for her to want to arrange everything in advance without wasting too much time. She was sure of both their feelings, she saw it working out, so she wanted to clearly put out her expectations to him. I now realize that the bucket list thing was probably also because of this character trait, she may have wanted to check all these things fast so as not to waste too much time and get over the dating part so their relationship could already evolve into what she was heading towards. But that was my problem with her at that point: the fact that she seemingly failed to fully acknowledge that there were two people in the relationship. I think she should’ve taken his feelings into more consideration before she started making plans of her own like that. Especially since it turned out that he had some serious issues to figure out first.
As I said, I did think it was nice to see how she comforted him and was immediately there for him when he was ready to talk, because she wasn’t planning on breaking up with him over something like that. Her decision for them to take a break was also for the best. But it was just that part from when they just started dating until the point where she became aware of something bothering him that didn’t sit right with me for some reason. She was already thinking ahead while he was still just trying to enjoy the moment and getting used to being loved like that. So there was still definitely some friction between them, only maybe this time it wasn’t necessarily because of them being polar opposites. It was just Pragmatism VS Mental Health Issues.

This may be an unpopular opinion as well, but I actually didn’t really feel the need to add in the destiny element between them. Like, it was nice that they met in Gongjin before as children, but then there were some other instances where apparently they’d met again as teenagers. There was even a flashback in which they were in the same high school or something? They ended up just using these as coincidences, as ‘That was you? Wow, that’s crazy’ moments, but that was it. I mean, even if they’d never met before, I don’t think it would’ve made any real difference to how their relationship worked out in the end. I actually didn’t really think there was a necessity to create a scene in which they’d met before. It’s not like they remembered each other all those years and were yearning to meet again. And then the scene where Hye Jin actually saw Doo Shik on that bridge when he was about to jump and she reported to the police that there was a seemingly bewildered person that probably needed to be rescued – what was the point of that? It didn’t even seem like something Hye Jin would do, as she always minded her own business. What was the reason they put that flashback in? It’s not like they remembered and acknowlegded that specific instance, it’s not like Hye Jin at some point realized that that was him on that bridge that night. It just seemed to be a bit overkill to force the destiny element like that.

Random comment in-between, but I initially thought that Hye Jin remembered the little boy from that childhood memory on the beach. In the epilogue of the first episode (I believe) we see the flashback of their first meeting as kids, where Doo Shik is walking on the beach with his grandfather while Hye Jin is there with her parents. Doo Shik’s grandfather ends up taking a picture of Hye Jin’s family, and little Doo Shik tries to make Hye Jin laugh for the picture. Shortly after moving to Gongjin, Hye Jin stops to look at a photo that’s displayed out of a photo studio, which portrays that little boy and his grandfather. She looks at it and then scoffingly says to herself, “I know a mischievous face when I see one”, after which the shot immediately shifts to Doo Shik. That in itself made me think that she recognized the boy somehow, either from her past, or even that it was Doo Shik, that she recognized his “mischievous smile”. The comment just suggested some recognition, in my opinion. But then when they eventually discover each other’s pictures and find out that they actually met as children and remember that instance, Hye Jin doesn’t even initially remember that there was a boy trying to make her laugh at the beach that day. And she certainly didn’t seem to know that the boy in the picture was Doo Shik. I may be thinking way too deeply about this, but then what was that comment of hers about? It really sounded to me as if she recognized the boy’s mischievous smile. But I guess apparently it was just a random comment on that the boy in the picture had a mischievous smile? Tiny detail, but I was just confused about that, lol.

Anyways, I think I’ve talked about the main couple for long enough now. I liked their individual characters, and they were certainly a unique couple as you wouldn’t expect two personalities like theirs to match so well somehow, but I still had mixed feelings about their couple dynamic. It was just so weird to suddenly see Hye Jin turn into such a giddy, affectionate, physical child who had to hug Doo Shik as soon as she saw him. Her whole conservative image just suddenly went out of the window, it seemed. And Doo Shik too, he just kind of melted away to make way for all her cheesy plans and actions and it’s just not how he seemed to me in the beginning of the series, I thought he’d be more firm and have more backbone, if that makes sense. Of course towards the end his mental health got the better of him, so I can’t fully blame him for losing grip. Anyways, I did really enjoy their slowburn, because their chemistry when they were still holding back and denying their own feelings was really amazing.

And now it’s finally time to talk about all the other characters in the story! There are so many stories yet to be discussed, so I will try to keep it as short as possible. I’m still going to devote at least one paragraph to each villager since they all deserve a proper mention as they are all very important to the story in their own way.

First of all, I would like to start with Hwa Jung and Yeong Gook (and Cho Hee and Yi Joon). One of the biggest mysteries in Gongjin is the real reason behind their divorce, since it seems that Hwa Jung just kicked Yeong Gook out one day. Yeong Gook himself doesn’t even know what happened, just that his ex-wife suddenly started hating his guts.
It all comes down to this: Hwa Jung, Yeong Gook and Cho Hee were all good friends in college, and despite her aloof behavior, Hwa Jung really loved Yeong Gook a lot. Yeong Gook may have initially liked Cho Hee, but his marriage to Hwa Jung was definitely not against his will. However, at some point during their marriage, Hwa Jung overheard him talking to a friend (I believe it was Oh Yoon) over drinks saying that he only married Hwa Jung out of pity, or at least so that she wouldn’t be left alone. He was drunk and not completely aware of what he was saying, so he never remembered saying anything that may have upset her. After that she started creating a fuss at home over how he never cleaned up his socks and this made him think she’d suddenly lost her mind and they got divorced. When the series starts, their son Yi Joon is the only thing still (barely) keeping them together. The only occasions on which they meet up are for Yi Joon’s birthday, or when he gets a special prize at school for being so exceptionally smart. Yi Joon doesn’t like that there has to be a special occasion for his parents to get together, but he never says anything about it. When Cho Hee suddenly reappears and becomes Yi Joon’s new teacher, Hwa Jung struggles with it. She seems to struggle with her feelings for Cho Hee in general. It’s not that she doesn’t like her, but she just sees how excited Yeong Gook gets when she returns and that he thinks he might now actually have a chance at getting back together with his first love.
Cho Hee, although she is seemingly really fond of Yeong Gook ( and I honestly thought she had feelings for him at first), rejects his feelings. I cannot tell you how much I liked this plot twist to be honest, although I did feel it coming at some point. Just because Cho Hee kept coming to Hwa Jung and it just didn’t feel like it was merely out of apologetic reasons. And then there was that flashback of Cho Hee’s mom visiting her and making her out to be crazy and Cho Hee asking her what was so crazy about liking someone. Then it just hit me. Cho Hee had actually been in love with Hwa Jung all this time. I am so happy that this was taken up into the story and that it was normalized like this. Even when she went to tell Hwa Jung, Hwa Jung never flinched, she just smiled at her and told her she already felt it. And she was so respectful too when she said that while she may not be able to return Cho Hee’s feelings in the same way, she still really likes her and wants her to be happy and not feel guilty about anything. Cho Hee may have been a relatively minor character, but I’m still glad she also got her own storyline and that it was wrapped in a positive way like this.
In the end, Yeong Gook is reminded of what he did on that drunk night when he is again drinking with Oh Yoon and the latter reminds him of it. He suddenly realizes how much he’s messed up and confronts Hwa Jung to talk about it and the two eventually make up, to big excitement of Yi Joon.

Can I just say in-between that I LOVED Yi Joon and Bo Ra so FREAKING much??? These two kids, seriously. It’s obvious that they’re getting married in the future, it’s just meant to be already. But man, I enjoyed these kids so much, their dynamic was so adorable. I loved that when Bo Ra sang in that competition you could just see Yi Joon fall in love with her, and then when he heartfully gave her his heart-shaped dalgona and she just ate it T^T And then when Yi Joon got super emotional over his parents getting back together and Bo Ra was just bawling to her parents about how she was going to live with Yi Joon in the future so that he’d never feel lonely again T^T These kids really stole my heart in this series, I’m going to give the child actors a big shoutout in my cast comments.

Speaking of Bo Ra, as the wild, carefree tomboy that she was, I think it was definitely good that she was constantly playing outside with Yi Joon, because I would not be so carefree if I had to witness my parents arguing with each other like that every single day. Geum Chul and Yoon Kyung were still a very young couple, so Yoon Kyung must have been even younger when she got pregnant with Bo Ra. I guess they were just the types that had quarrelling as their love language, but sometimes I really feared that they might split up or something. Especially leading up to the second birth, Geum Chul sometimes just seemed like a very lax husband. He even made a big deal about tying his wife’s shoelaces for her while he knew that bending down with a belly like that could not be comfortable. And come on, they’d done it before, so didn’t he learn anything from that? Anyways, there were definitely some tensions between the two of them, although I do think that it was just their love language to treat each other like that. I would’ve liked to see some more tender moments between them, though, because now I just found myself wondering why the heck they got married to one another, lol.
I think the only part in which we could see some reluctant affection between them was when Yoon Kyung gave birth, I just liked getting a bit more insight in their relationship dynamic, like how they were when it was just the two of them. There wasn’t anything really heavy going on between them, so their storyline mostly revolved around Yoon Kyung’s second pregnancy, but it was still nice to get to know them a little better.

Then there’s Oh Yoon, or Oh Chun Jae. I really liked how, even though people kind of ignored him when he talked about being a former musician, everyone in the village really respected him and he was actually pretty easy on the ear and good on the guitar. It was nice to see a sensitive side of him when he talked about his wife and about how much Joo Ri meant to him. I’m glad we got to see a bit more of their father-daughter dynamic. Oh Yoon was really made out to be more than just the comical character he appeared to be in the first episode. I really liked that at the end of the series, when Seung Hyun’s show about Gongjin Village is broadcasted, Oh Yoon actually gets a call from another variety show asking him to appear in a segment about former legendary celebrities. You could see how much that meant to him, even after he’d already resigned from trying to reclaim his past fame.
Joo Ri is really in that phase where nothing really means anything to her besides her favorite idol group DOS, and she just wants to look pretty for her bias. She doesn’t really pay a lot of attention to anyone in the village except for people who can help her with something. I think kids that age (I think she’s 14?) don’t really stop to look around them and consider that much yet. But I think that deep down, she really does appreciate the community that she has in Gongjin Village.

The story of Nam Sook is one of the tougher ones to swallow, because she’s also been through something really traumatic. Just like with Doo Shik, she’s also the kind of person that you would never expect to have gone through such a loss, and consequently I think her character gives a very powerful message of how someone can pick up their life again after going through something horrible like that. Nam Sook is the busybody of the village, she always pokes her nose in other people’s business and is basically the village chatterbox – I believe she also calls herself that at some point. She has lost her daughter, who was around Joo Ri’s age, to cancer (or another terminal disease) and after processing her loss, she returned to her lively, energetic self all the while making regular donations to children’s hospitals. Her loss has also made her become even more loving and doting towards kids, and she really treats Joo Ri like her own daughter. Despite her overbearing personality, Nam Sook is definitely very naive as well. At some point, she is almost scammed out of the money she wishes to donate. Luckily the case is resolved issue before any real harm could be done, but this is definitely a turning point for the relationship between the Nam Sook and Hye Jin. There have been tensions between them ever since Hye Jin moved to Gongjin, since she finds Nam Sook way to obnoxious, all the more than she starts spreading rumors of better dental deals to take customers away from her. After this incident, both women learn to treat each other a bit more respectfully, and acknowledge that they are the way they are and in that way they learn to deal with each other better.

Finally, the three Gongjin Grandmothers, and especially Kim Gam Ri. They are an entertaining trio in the village, always bickering but clearly full of respect and affection for one another. Gam Ri is one of the most respected grandmothers in the village, she is just so genuinely kind and pure, she always makes food enough for everyone. She has been looking after Doo Shik ever since his grandfather passed away and she’s like actual family to him. The bond between them is really beautiful. Of course we love her even more when we discover that she actually saved Doo Shik’s life. When the whole fiasco in Seoul went down and he’d just lost Jung Woo, Doo Shik was about to jump off a bridge when he received a message from Gam Ri saying that she wanted to visit him and that he needed to eat well and that they were all waiting for him to come visit Gongjin Village again. Even after Doo Shik secluded himself again afer that exposure from the film crew member, she came to bring him food every single day.
Gam Ri is a bit suspicious of Hye Jin when she first arrives at Gongjin, she sees her as a negligent city lady who can’t appreciate the daily work and life at the village, but as time passes she becomes the person who supports Doo Shik and Hye Jin’s relationship the most. She was so happy to see him smile so much when he was with her, it was really all she’d hoped for. I can only imagine how she would have reacted to the news of them getting married, she would’ve been so blissed out, I’m sure.
I believe Mat Yi and Sook Ja also both had children in the city, but we don’t get a lot of background story from them. The scenes in which the three of them are taking a walk together, especially the scene where Doo Shik takes their picture in the flower field, are really nice because they have a really fun group dynamic as well. Gam Ri is the oldest, Mat Yi the second and Sook Ja the ‘youngest’, and you can also see that in the color of their hair (from lightest to darkest) and the way they dress, even though they’re still all about the floral patterns.
Of course I didn’t want to acknowledge it, but I kind of saw it coming that Gam Ri would pass away in the end. Not in any bad way, she passes peacefully in her sleep while Mat Yi and Sook Ja are staying with her, after having a good laugh about their endeavours together. But of course this comes as a big shock for the whole village, since she was so well-respected. After her passing, Doo Shik and Hye Jin discover a letter she put in one of the food baskets she’d left at Doo Shik’s door when she last brought him food. In that letter, again, her pure wish for him to be happy comes through and I really think that this is the last piece of closure that Doo Shik needed to leave everything behind him. The last kind voice telling him that he is a good person, that he did nothing wrong, that they all care about him and wish the best for him, that he deserves to be happy. That was really heartwarming. It really felt as if she was watching over him from above with that kind smile on her face. Despite the sadness of her passing, I do think that it was a good time for her to go and that she also felt that. The last thing she did was make sure Doo Shik was happy and left behind in good hands, and that was all she wished for him.

Lastly, and I’ve been saving this bit for a reason, but I REALLY need to talk about Mi Seon and Eun Chul. They were my FAVORITE couple of the whole series, even more so than the main leads, to be honest.
Mi Seon was definitely my favorite character, let’s start with that. She may have also started out as a bit of a shallow city woman who cared most about appearances when it came to men she dated, but she really grew as a person and had a lot of character development. She chooses to follow Hye Jin to Gongjin after she finds her boyfriend cheat on her and feels like she has nothing left in Seoul. As she also worked as a dental assistant before, she automatically helps Hye Jin set up her new business. She meets Eun Chul on one of her first days there, and is immediately taken with his looks. However, Eun Chul in turn is quite conservative and slow in picking up signals. For him it takes time to really get to know someone before he would gather the courage to ask her out. He is initially very flustered by Mi Seon’s direct approach and the way she straightforwardly tells him her intentions. He initially rejects her, not because he doesn’t like her but just because she’s going too fast for him, and Mi Seon interprets that as an official rejection. However, her feelings by then have already gone beyond just visual attraction and it takes some time but eventually Eun Chul is able to convey to her that he is indeed interested in her as well, and that he’s even willing to “skip some steps”. They were just so adorable. This is a dynamic that I’m weak for, the straightforward woman and the dense guy. That scene at the chicken rotisserie stand, when even the vendor started talking to his chickens about how dense this guy was, THREW me. Eun Chul is such a cinnamon roll, and I really liked how Mi Seon grew in her way of thinking about romantic relationships as well. They both opened up to new possibilities, and it was nice to see them both mature in that aspect.
The third big mystery of Gongjin, the unknown winner of a lottery ticket from Yoon Kyung’s supermarket, turns out to be Eun Chul and at the end it’s revealed that he has a LOT of money saved up. He never became lazy after he got rich, he still decided to work as a police officer and makes regular donations. It is suggested that he and Mi Seon plan to get married soon after Hye Jin and Doo Shik (I believe they already planned their wedding before the other couple did but they cut in line). Anyways, they also plan on getting married and Eun Chul will build Mi Seon a house on top of one of Gongjin’s beautiful hills. How romantic is this guy, seriously. I was only slightly disappointed in their one and only kiss though, I would’ve liked to see Eun Chul loosen up a bit as he became more and more unable to contain his feelings for Mi Seon. But they were still adorable and I enjoyed all their scenes together.

Okay, so now it’s finally time for cast comments! 😀 I might not discuss every single person I mentioned above, but there are some actors that I just really want to mention.

I remember seeing Shin Min Ah for the first time in My Girlfriend is a Gumiho in 2010, it was one of the first K-Dramas I ever watched and she was SO adorable there. She just had this cute, cheeky charm about her and I’ve been following her in dramas ever since. I’ve seen her in Oh My Venus and Tomorrow With You, which are also really good. And now she’s also in Our Blues, WITH Kim Woo Bin and I’m super excited to watch that soon as well. I like that she’s an actress who just has a more mature feel to her, like she really is more woman than girl. Maybe that’s why her acting like a lovey-dovey teenager just felt a bit off to me, I just didn’t think it matched her image. But I don’t want to imply that I didn’t like her performance in this drama, it was really interesting to see her paired up with Kim Sun Ho and as I mentioned before I really LIVED for their slowburn. I’m very curious to see what else she’ll do in the future!

I’ve only really noticed Kim Sun Ho in Start-Up (although I also saw him in 100 Day Husband), but he must have just captured my heart there because I was really excited to watch this new drama of his. And he really stole my heart as Doo Shik. Honestly, on several occasions he had a Ji Chang Wook effect on me which has never happened with another actor before. I think it was a really interesting choice to cast him as the hillbilly handyman since he has such delicate features, but somehow it made him all the more manly and attractive? Like, it definitely showed a new side of him which I liked. It was also nice to see him smile so much, I love his goofy smile. I can definitely see why people were excited about him and Shin Min Ah in a drama together, even calling them the ‘dimple couple’, haha. Dimples make everything better. Anyways, I really loved his character and how he portrayed him, layers and all. I think he did a good job in portraying someone who hid a lot of pain behind a seemingly carefree smile, and thinking about it makes it even sadder to know that this counts for so many people around the world. I just wish everyone would have such a good support system as Doo Shik did. Gongjin, the village and its people, literally saved his life.

I kept wondering where I knew Lee Sang Yi from, his face looked so familiar to me! And then I discovered it’s probably because of The Third Charm, which is the most recent thing I saw with him. He was also in Manhole and Andante, apparently! I really liked him in this series, he was such a cool and respectable guy. I liked Seung Hyun’s bromance with Doo Shik, and also how respectful and kind he was to Hye Jin. And he just never lost his quirkiness, either. He was the embodiment of a mature second male lead, and he dealt with being friendzoned in a very respectable way, no hurt pride or fragile masculinity or anything. It was nice to see such a refreshing, open-minded, non-judgmental male character, more of this please! He just made me want to be friends with him. And I also liked that he made the decision by himself to go after his writer colleague, not just because he wanted to keep working with her but because he just decided that he wanted to keep spending time with her in general. It was nice to see him get over Hye Jin’s rejection and move on all by himself.

Gong Min Jung looked so familiar to me, she has such a unique face, and I guess it’s because I’ve seen her in Wife I Know and Temperature of Love, but I can’t recall her characters from those series, to be honest. Guess it’s a good thing I decided to write reviews, so I can remind myself, huh? 😉 But yeah, as I said, Mi Seon was my favorite character in this series. She was such a loyal friend to Hye Jin but she also dealt with her own issues and never stopped being quirky in her own way. I loved her chemistry with Eun Chul, those two really found each other where they least expected it. Moving to Gongjin might have been a whim decision for her as much as it was for Hye Jin, but it did seem like she was able to adapt to the countryside life much easier than her friend, she never seemed to have a problem with joining the villagers in their gossip sessions and always relayed whatever she heard back to Hye Jin, who remained more on the outside. I loved the friendship between the two women, the fact that Mi Seon didn’t blink twice at deciding to stay with Hye Jin, how they would comfort each other when they were down, and how they both supported each other’s relationships. I really want to see more of this woman’s acting now!

KIM YOUNG OK. I have mentioned it many times before, but this was another drama in which she showed that she really is the Grandmother of K-Dramas. Aged 84 and still going strong, uri halmeoni. I’ve seen her in so many dramas by now, including The 1st Shop of Coffee Prince, Boys Over Flowers, Shopping King Louie, and most recently The King: Eternal Monarch. As soon as I saw her in this I knew she was going to steal my heart again, and she did. I think it might have been the first time I’ve seen her as a countryside granny, though, but it suited her very well, she looked very comfortable in those clothes!
Kim Young Ok is one of those actresses that I will always be happy to see in a drama, she’s just always such an immense comfort person. I can only imagine what it must be like for those younger actors to get the chance to work with her, she’s such a veteran. There wasn’t anything not to love about Gam Ri, she was the ultimate granny to the whole village, a true Gongjin-er. I loved how she would always offer to make food for people she didn’t even know that well yet, and even though she did refrain from allowing Seung Hyun and his crew to use her house for the filming in the beginning, when she did finally allow it she received the best treatment as the VIP of Gongjin from them as a result. The way she eventually passed really seemed as if she’d accepted it, she had seen everything play out as she’d wished for, and most of all she’d seen Doo Shik in a happy relationship with Hye Jin and that filled her with the most happiness of all. I will never have a bad thing to say about her performance ever, I love this woman.

Jo Han Chul never ceases to entertain me, to be honest. I love how he always plays a kind of comical character, but there’s a always room for him to show what a good actor he really is. I’ve seen him in High Schooler King of Life, Healer, Producer, Tomorrow With You, 100 Day Husband and Romance is a Bonus Book and I will definitely watch more dramas with him in the future. Here as well, even though introduced as a bit of a comic relief character, in the scenes that were about his love for his late wife and his daughter, he really came through with his serious and sensitive acting and it was really nice to see his versatility. I liked him as this character, the countryside musician part suited him very much!

I kept wondering how I recognized Kim Min Seo, because I couldn’t think of any drama that I knew her from, but I realized afterwards that I don’t actually know her from any K-Drama. She’s the girl from the ODG YouTube channel! I’ve seen several YouTube videos of her, amongst the one where she had to pretend like she didn’t know who IU was while she was actually a super big fan of hers and she even burst out into tears after she was allowed to stop pretending. I’d never actually seen her act in anything before, so that’s what caused the confusion. Anyways, it was so cool finally seeing her in a drama! I hope it will give her many more opportunities to show her skills as a child actor, because she’s really good! I liked her the part where she got to meet her bias from DOS, that was such a defining moment for her. Looking forward to seeing her appear in more things!

Speaking of regular comic relief actors that get to show their serious acting skills, In Gyo Jin. So far, I believe I’ve mostly seen him portray unsympathetic characters, in Sassy Go Go and Jugglers, and even though he also appeared to be a bit of a pervert in this series, he really made a switch for the better. I was really impressed by his serious acting when Yeong Gook realized how he messed up his marriage and how he came back to make amends with Hwa Jung. I always like it when I get to see new sides of actors that I know, so that was nice!

Lee Bong Ryun is growing on me with every new drama I see of her. I’ve seen her in Tomorrow With You, While You Were Sleeping, Melting Me Softly, Run On and she’s also in a couple of series that are still on my to watch list. She’s such a steady actress, and she always gives such a fun touch to all of her characters. I liked to see her portray Hwa Jung, since she was coping with some very complicated feelings as well. She was very good at pretending to be alright, to keep a straight face and just keep up the lie that she divorced her husband because she got sick of him. But on the other hand, in the scenes with her son Yi Joon, she would be the most fun mom and she doted on him so much, it was really adorable. Lee Bong Ryun is slowly but surely also becoming one of those actresses that I just get excited over as soon as I see her in appear in something, she’s such a unique presence and I think she has a lot to offer.

If we thought that Cha Chung Hwa really suited the look of a middle-aged countryside lady, that’s because she was one of the North Korean village ladies in Crash Landing on You as well! No wonder it looked so natural on her, haha. I’ve also seen her in Shopping King Louie and Hotel Del Luna before, apparently. It was nice to see her get a bit of back story in this drama, I don’t think I’ve actually seen her play a character before with a lot of background story. The switch from the scene where she was in the hospital bed with her daughter to the one where she remained behind on the empty bed by herself with the little magic wand really made me go soft. It went from so endearing to so heartbreaking. As I mentioned, I think her character conveyed a very important message, one you may not have expected from one of the more ‘obnoxious’ villagers. I guess you should just never judge a book by its cover!

And then, as promised, a big shoutout to Ki Eun Yoo & Go Do Yeon who played Yi Joon and Bo Ra. In many ways, their dynamic together knocked a couple of the adult actors out of the park! I’ve only seen Go Do Yeon before in Gyeryong Fairytale and It’s Okay to Not Be Okay, but she definitely jumped out to me more in this series (probably because of the blonde hair, haha). I guess I will be seeing more of them in future dramas and series that are still on my to watch list, but they really made this drama for me. Seriously, friendship + future relationship goals! Even though the characters are fictious, I just want them to be together forever T^T They were really amazing.

Lastly, I wanted to comment on that I liked that Oh Ui Shik had a guest appearance as Jung Woo, Doo Shik’s college senior. He’s always such a nice and friendly face in K-Dramas and it was nice that he came to see Doo Shik one last time in spirit to tell him that it wasn’t his fault. It may have added a fictious element to the story, but I think it’s what Doo Shik really needed to hear, and he was the person he needed to hear it from. I really liked to see him!

Okay, so I have finally reached the end of my review! I hope it wasn’t too long and tedious, but there was just so much to say about all of the characters. Overall, I really enjoyed it, especially in the beginning. It was really healing to watch and I loved the beautiful seaside sceneries. I also really liked the soundtrack. Once again I will have to look up several of the songs, because they were just so nice on the ears. The story in itself was also refreshing, I honestly didn’t expect anything dark and serious to happen when I started. I definitely did not expect there to be a part about mental health issues, but in the end it only emphasized the healing message of the series. It just proves again that mental health issues are serious, they can weigh a person down in more ways than one. In this case, it made a young, healthy and innocent guy to believe that he wasn’t worthy of happiness and love. Be careful with what you tell people in the heat of the moment, because it might be just the heat of the moment for you, but they might carry it with them for the rest of their lives. It isn’t always necessary to blame someone for something that’s happened, although I understand the need to have a scapegoat. It’s so important to stay relative in these kinds of situations, and not just blindly point at other people. You never know, they might be suffering from it just as much as you are, or even more. So yeah, that was a message that I definitely did not see coming when I started this drama and I’m just glad it was smoothed out.
All in all, it was a really satisyfing drama all the more because it dealt with everyone’s issues. Literally every single person’s story and lingering resentments were dealt with and everyone got their own kind of closure, from the main characters to literally every minor character including Gam Ri’s son in the final episode. The guy only appeared for one episode and still got his regrets resolved after talking with Doo Shik. Gongjin Village really seems like the place to be if you need to heal, in whatever way. This is most definitely a healing drama, if I haven’t emphasized that enough yet, haha. Even people that thought they’d already dealt with all their stuff ended up still having something to wrap up.
In terms of other kinds of closure, I liked how all three Gongjin mysteries were solved, as well. They really did live up to answering all the questions they posed in the beginning. Honestly, they mention these 3 big mysteries in one of the first episodes, but I didn’t even really think about them anymore. I honestly wouldn’t even have minded if I didn’t find out why Hwa Jung and Yeong Gook got divorced, if the mysteries remained mysteries or if even one was solved. But when it became clear that they were really going to work out every single story, I was all there for it.
As much as I initially thought the story would be about Hye Jin, in hindsight I think it was actually more about Doo Shik’s healing than hers, even though everyone had stuff to work through and heal from, in one way or another. I also liked how Hye Jin grew as a person and let go of some prior prejudices and resentments, mostly towards her stepmother. She didn’t seem to be that close to her father before, and it’s not like she suddenly became super close with him, but their bond definitely became a bit better. I haven’t really talked about Hye Jin’s father and stepmother, but they were also important figures in her story. I really liked how, in the scene when they came to visit her and she had Doo Shik pretend to be her boyfriend, the father really gradually let his guard down after his initial dislike for Doo Shik, and afterwards was even disappointed to find out he wasn’t actually her boyfriend, haha. It was good of Doo Shik to come clean to him, though. And I liked how Hye Jin in turn also opened up more to her stepmother, she seemed really happy for Hye Jin to call her ‘mom’ in the end.
Some scars run deeper than others and some aren’t as much scars as they are mindsets or habits that need to be put into perspective. In a more general sense, you could say this series is about life. About how it can teach you harsh lessons, but also show you how to heal and move on. That it’s sometimes necessary to change your environment and find new inspiration and a new perspective.

Thank you so much for reading through another review, I still strive to make them as accessible as possible. I will now be moving on to my third item on the list of more recent released that I can’t wait for, and after that I will move on with my list for a while again. I hope everyone stays healthy and safe and enjoys their summer as much as possible. I for one now really crave the scenery of a seaside village, haha.

Until soon! Bye-bee! ^^

Disclaimer: this is a review, and as such it contains spoilers of the whole series. Please proceed to read at your own risk if you still plan on watching this show or if you haven’t finished it yet. You have been warned.

A Business Proposal
(사내맞선 / Sanaematseon)
MyDramaList rating: 7.5/10

Hiya! I come back to you with a new review before the end of the month! I hope everyone is still keeping healthy and happy out there. I have to say, now that I started working 4 days a week instead of 5, I feel much more rested and I love that I now have some extra time fulfilling that need for rest by watching more drama series, as well. So the drama I watched this time is a very recent one, I decided to put my to watch list on hold for a moment to catch up on some highly anticipated 2022 dramas simply because I could not wait to watch them. This is number one and I can say right off the bat that I’m really glad I watched it now and didn’t force myself to wait. I really liked it. It gave me all the feels of a classic romcom K-Drama, but with actual straightforward, contemporary characters and even though the humor at times got a little slapsticky, it never got annoying or too much. I think it was a very nice mix of classic tropes, but it was also very refreshing because of it’s simplicity, not too much heavy emotional stuff, and very effective chemistry between the main characters. Without further ado, let’s go!

A Business Proposal is a 12-episode Netflix K-Drama with each episode lasting about an hour. It’s about food researcher Shin Ha Ri (played by Kim Se Jeong), who works at a company called GoFood. She’s really good at her work and belongs to Product Development Team 1, so she actually gets to develop new food products with her team. Her family consists further of her parents – I’ll call them Mr. Shin and Mrs. Han – (played respectively by Kim Kwang Gyu and Jung Young Joo) and her younger brother Ha Min (played by Choi Byung Chan). Her parents own a chicken restaurant at which she and her brother also occasionally help out. Ha Ri’s best friend is Jin Young Seo (played by Seol In Ah), who is from a rich family, but who is like a second daughter to Ha Ri’s parents and the two girls hang out a lot and get drunk together occasionally, they are the bestest of besties. On a side note, Ha Ri has a college friend, Lee Min Woo (played by Song Won Suk) on whom she’s had a crush for 7 years, but he never gave her the chance to tell him her feelings since he keeps going back to his ex – despite clearly having some unresolved feelings for Ha Ri too. Min Woo is a chef who also gets involved in a collaboration with Ha Ri’s company at some point, but in any case, he’s Ha Ri’s first love.
On the other hand, there’s Kang Tae Moo (played by Ahn Hyo Seop), he is the CEO of Ha Ri’s company GoFood. His grandfather (played by Lee Duk Hwa) is the Chairman of this company. Anyways, Tae Moo is a very stoic guy who’s a complete workaholic and has little interest in anything else. His secretary and also brother-like best friend is Cha Sung Hoon (played by Kim Min Gyu), and although he tries to alert Tae Moo of his occasional rudeness to people, he mostly just goes along with what he does. When they are together, they always pull a lot of attention since they are both considered to be very handsome.
One day, Tae Moo’s grandfather tells him that he is setting him up on blind dates since he wants Tae Moo to settle down and get married. As a workaholic with no interest in finding romance, Tae Moo refuses but then agrees to go on one date, even if it’s just to keep his grandfather pleased and not hear anything more about these blind dates. The date he’s set up with is, miraculously, Jin Young Seo, Ha Ri’s friend.
Young Seo receives notice of this blind date while she’s out drinking with Ha Ri and begs her friend to take her place in the blind date to scare him off, as Ha Ri has done for her multiple times before. After initially refusing, Ha Ri agrees that it will be the last time and she meets up with Tae Moo while dressed in a very extravagant way with a lot of makeup. She does her best to come off as raunchy as possible, and after she leaves the date she feels confident that he’ll never want to see her again.
But then the news reaches Young Seo that Kang Tae Moo is actually very interested in seeing “her” again – something went terribly wrong with messing up the date and Ha Ri is forced to meet him again a couple of times, although she keeps saying that she doesn’t want to marry him.
Of course, it’s a very complicated situation for Ha Ri since she found out during the blind date that this was her own company’s CEO (she’d never actually seen him before in real life) and she’s terrified that he’ll recognize her at work. So then there’s a part where she regularly has to change between her blind date persona and her real identity in order not to get found out and risk being fired.
It doesn’t take long for the partial truth to come out that she is not Young Seo, but then the story becomes that Young Seo hired her and they don’t actually know each other. Ha Ri tells Tae Moo that her name is Shin Geum Hee (incidentally the name of the protagonist of a very popular drama series in the show that everyone’s constantly watching in the meantime), and she’s even introduced to his grandfather.

Okay, so this is basically where all the issues start in the story, with Ha Ri digging herself deeper into her own lies. As I mentioned in the introduction, there were a few situations that became a bit slapsticky, and these were mostly situations in which Ha Ri tried to escape events that would threaten her identity to be exposed. Looking at it realistically, of course she wouldn’t actually have to resort to such dramatically comical solutions, but it did make for a good laugh. Honestly, I couldn’t with the one incident where she almost ran into Min Woo while dressed as Geum Hee and she just folded over and blindly headed towards the open door of a randomly parked car and hid inside. I mean, she probably thought it was an empty taxi or she just thoughtlessly climbed into a stranger’s car (of course it was Tae Moo’s car), but that really got me shaking my head because she could’ve literally just walked by Min Woo with her face averted and he wouldn’t have even noticed her. Maybe I’m being too serious here, but this just got me facepalming, haha. Anyways, there’s multiple of these situations that’d make me go ‘oh, girl, come on, there is most definitely a better and more natural way to get out of this’.
Her situation seems to be solved once Tae Moo suddenly contacts her saying that she (Geum Hee) is fired and they don’t need to meet again. This is when Tae Moo has discovered her true identity. They’ve been on several dates by this point and he actually started developing some feelings for her, but then while driving by the chicken restaurant, he sees her come out as Ha Ri carrying the trash. He harrasses her a bit at work in the week after that, but he can’t stop himself from constantly thinking about her while he’s on business trips and such, so he decides to forgive her. All seems to be good and well as the two come to terms with the whole situation and they actually start growing towards each other for real, but there’s one mistake that Tae Moo made that still makes what happened an open case – he never informed his grandfather of the truth about Geum Hee. As it happens, while Grandpa really warmed up to Geum Hee, he’s gotten into a very embarrassing situation with Ha Ri during a field trip for her team at work, a situation in which Ha Ri once again tried to hide from him so he wouldn’t recognize her face. Several occasions have happened since that have made Grandpa very suspicious of Shin Ha Ri, and when the truth finally comes out, it’s also not easy for her to win back his trust.

While this whole situation is playing out between Ha Ri and Tae Moo, there’s also the interesting pairing of Young Seo and Sung Hoon. They meet by chance at a convenience store one time and for both of them it’s like ✨D E S T I N Y✨. They both fall in love with each other at first sight. Of course, since we first only see Young Seo’s side of the story, we’re not sure of Sung Hoon’s side, but they keep meeting in fateful ways, at specific restaurants, and they even become nextdoor neighbors when Young Seo cuts herself loose from her father’s influence and starts living on her own. Sung Hoon initially draws a firm line between them, since there is the incident of her fooling his boss and sending someone else instead on her blind date with him. But it doesn’t take long for them to admit to their mutual attraction and they get physical with each other quite easily (although it probably helped that Young Seo was drunk the first time). Anyways, they manage to resolve any misunderstandings and start happily dating. While the main story is about Ha Ri and Tae Moo, Young Seo and Sung Hoon are definitely two very firm pillars and I would also like to call them fellow main leads rather than the ‘second leads’ because they were just as important to the story.

Moving on to my analysis – I think I’ve covered the summary of the series now more than enough – I would like to start with the relationships between all the characters, because I really liked the dynamics between the four of them. I will talk more about the romantic relationships, but first of all let’s start with the friendships.
I LOVED Ha Ri and Young Seo’s friendship. They were so comfortable with each other, it was really nice to see a realistic friendship between two women in a K-Drama where there was no shame, no need to hide anything, no need to keep up appearances. The last drama I remember seeing with this kind of female friendship was Because This Is My First Life, it’s just so refreshing to see two adult women in such a steady friendship like this. Ha Ri could’ve gotten angry at Young Seo for making her go to all those blind dates in her place but she never did. Young Seo could have become angry at Ha Ri for failing to scare Tae Moo off the first time, and while she did get a little annoyed, she never truly blamed Ha Ri for her or held it against her. They were just so loyal to each other and they trusted each other so much, like actual sisters. It was really nice to see them act like teenagers on one moment, and then really being there for each other, emotionally supporting each other the next. I think this might be one of my most favorite friendships depicted between women in a K-Drama so far, I really enjoyed their scenes together, there was never a dull moment.
On the other hand, there’s Tae Moo and Sung Hoon, and while they seemed to be a bit more distant than the two women, there was definitely some real bromance going on between them. That scene when this nurse came in while Sung Hoon was helping Tae Moo get dressed at the hospital and it just looked like they were hugging and the nurse was just like “I’ll give you two some space 👀” SENT me. I also loved that she just accepted it and got all giddy about it herself, haha, we’re all for acceptance on this issue in Asian drama series! Anyways, how Tae Moo started teasing Sung Hoon after that happened was so great, because you could finally see this mischievous side come out off him, and he’d probably never act like that with any other guy. I loved how Tae Moo and Sung Hoon were like actual brothers, and how Grandpa also just took Sung Hoon in as his second grandson. It was so touching when Sung Hoon finally called him ‘grandpa’ at the end after they found out he was sick. Their friendship and living situation also reminded me of the one of the male leads from Love Alarm. I have to admit that I think I missed the full explanation of how Sung Hoon came to live with Tae Moo and his grandfather, was the lady from the orphanage his biological mother? I thought she was, but did that mean she just couldn’t take care of her son full-time because of the orphanage? I’m sure they talked about it but I didn’t catch the full story, so if anyone managed to pick that up, do let me know!

What I really liked about this series as a whole was how it was so light and simple. It incorporated a lot of classical tropes and cliches but made it modern, and I also like that they used the show about the Geum Hee character in the background as a sort of reflection, because that was definitely an example of a very old-fashioned cliche drama series. It was like they made a parallel by letting the two shows exist alongside each other to create a comparison between old-fashioned and modern-time drama series.
I also have to say that it was very refreshing that there was no real, as I like to call it, ✨destiny✨ element in this series. With this I mean that there was no event that linked the characters to each other through the past, nothing that fatefully brought them back to each other as if they were meant to be. Before becoming a couple, the characters were completely unrelated to one another. They met in the here and now through self-created circumstances.
The only childhood trauma story was that of Tae Moo being triggered by rainy days. His parents died in a car accident on a rainy day while rushing to see him for his birthday, and he’s always blamed himself for that. It’s used more as a character development tool than as a defining back story in my opinion, because Ha Ri actually helps him get through it. She picks up on it by coincidence when she hears some people talk about it and then tries to accomodate him as much as possible so they won’t have to go out in the rain and while she doesn’t literally tell him “I’m doing this because I know about your trauma”, it was probably the best way to deal with it, because in that way Tae Moo also picked up on what she was trying to do for him without her having to explain it to him. I think it was really wonderful to see how close they became, they really became each other’s solace, each other’s rock. Ha Ri comforted him during rainy days and Tae Moo helped her get closure with her feelings for Min Woo in a time when they weren’t even officially together yet. It was heartwarming to see that their romance went as far as becoming emotionally dependent on each other, they opened up about their true feelings and especially for Tae Moo this was a pretty big step since he’d always kept stuff inside. It was so satisfying when he confided in her how worried he was about his grandpa when they found out about his illness. He asked her to come with him to the US, but was completely aware that this might be a selfish request and he was completely okay with her refusing, he didn’t even try to persuade her any further, he just said ‘I already knew, but I just had to get it out’.
I think the relationship between Young Seo and Sung Hoon was also very contemporary and realistic. I only got annoyed with Young Seo at ONE point, when she became really petty during the mountain climbing scene. Then I was just like, where did the Young Seo I loved so much up until now go?? But on the other hand, it was also to demonstrate that both of them needed to put in effort to make their relationship work. They couldn’t just rely on falling for each other at first sight and expecting everything to be perfect from then on. So I think it was good that they had these fall-outs as well, because they just proved to be obstacles that they could figure out together.
I think both couples represented mixed social rank romance, of each couple one party belonged to a higher social class than the other, and that also made it a bit reminiscent of High Society. In the end, while Ha Ri and Tae Moo did get the approval of Grandpa, they didn’t need to overcome that many other obstacles in regards to their differing social ranks, and Young Seo also cut herself loose from her father and his company in order to stay with Sung Hoon, even though it was hard to turn her back on her family. But I hope this is just another contribution to showing that love knows no boundaries, and definitely no differences on social ranks. People should all have the right to fall in love and be with the person of their own choosing, love should not be a business proposal.

I haven’t talked about Ha Ri’s colleagues yet and I really want to because these people were awesome. So Product Development Team 1 further consisted of Head Yeo Eui Joo (played by Kim Hyun Sook), Deputy Head Gye Bin (played by Im Ki Hong) and new employee Kim Hye Ji (played by Yoon Sang Jung). It was just so nice to see that Ha Ri had a solid team behind her at work, even though they were quite chaotic. Even when rumors started spreading that she was dating the CEO and even that she was two-timing him and Min Woo, her colleagues still had her back and stood up for her against gossipping employees. The dynamics between them were really nice and funny, and I also really liked how Ms. Yeo and Mr. Gye became a couple, especially because the dynamic between the two of them was opposite of what you’d might expect. I think the Product Development Team 1 scenes probably made me laugh out loud the most. I couldn’t with Hye Ji getting super drunk at that team dinner and just blurting out stuff, the drunk scenes were acted out really hilariously.

There’s two more side stories I have to address before I move on to my cast + final character comments.
The first one is the one of Min Woo and Ha Ri, and consequently, Min Woo’s ex turned girlfriend again, Go Yoo Ra (played by Bae Woo Hee). Just to cut to the chase, Yoo Ra is a real bitch. She only started dating Min Woo because she knew Ha Ri was interested in him and she just wanted to bother her. But then when Min Woo started rising in status as a chef, she suddenly starts wanting to get him all the press and attention to boast with him being her boyfriend. Her intentions were never clean with Min Woo, but as soon as she sees how much he still cares for Ha Ri, even as a friend, she still gets jealous. In my opinion, she really shouldn’t have poked her nose in their friendship to begin with. In the beginning it’s really obvious how much Ha Ri likes Min Woo, and we just feel so sorry for her when we see he’s getting back with his ex. But on the other hand, as soon as Ha Ri and Tae Moo start dating, we see Min Woo getting uncomfortable with that. He claims that he just doesn’t want Ha Ri to get hurt, but there really seems to be more going on. Of course, he’s already missed his chance by then, Ha Ri is already getting over him, and he never actually spoke out how he truly felt about Ha Ri, but I think it’s safe to say that they had feelings for each other but probably just never found the right timing or something. And then Yoo Ra started butting in, of course. What I did love about Ha Ri was how mature she remained, even while knowing that Yoo Ra wasn’t being very decent. She left it all up to Min Woo to sort out his own stuff rather than rat her out to him because that’s the mature thing to do. She was the kind of person who would just silently step back instead of forcing her own feelings onto him, and that was really characteristic of her, all the more in comparison to Yoo Ra who just went for keeping up appearances. In the end I really did hope that Ha Ri and Min Woo could be at least friends again, although I imagine it would take time, the two at least expressed that they’d be up for trying again. I’m glad it worked out between them.

Lastly, and this is something that I just felt like I had to bring up because it’s become such a meme online: Jo Yoo Jung. At some point, Young Seo’s cousing Jo Yoo Jung (played by Seo Hye Won) appears at their family’s company. She’s a very extravagant character who uses a lot of English in her sentences and acts very dramatically. She has a short story arc in which she is set up for a blind date with Tae Moo, but since Tae Moo goes off to confirm his love for Ha Ri, he asks Sung Hoon to go in his place. What happens next is that Yoo Jung actually falls for Sung Hoon on the spot and keeps bothering him even when he’s made it very clear that he has a girlfriend.
Like, I get that the “YOU KNOW I HAVE NO CHINGU” scene was very iconic and meme-worthy, but honestly, I didn’t really understand her contribution to the drama. It’s not like she formed an actual threat to Young Seo and Sung Hoon’s relationship, she was just a funny comical side character that disappeared again as soon as her antics were over. I wasn’t exactly sure what her deal was, in the first place, only that she was Young Seo’s cousin and that they were like cats and dogs but then Young Seo did also comfort her and you could see that, if they’d put their judgements aside, they might actually be able to get along. She did cause an incident that made Young Seo’s annoyance with Sung Hoon’s devotion to Tae Moo flare up, though, so she might have been a plot tool to cause that kind of situation to be brought up. Young Seo got pissed at Sung Hoon for always blindly following Tae Moo’s orders, mostly because they always caused him to lie to her about what was actually going on. In the end, the issue was resolved when she found out about his past, his mother who ran the orphanage, and Tae Moo formally apologizing to her.

Okay, so now we go onto the cast + character comments!

First of all Kim Se Jeong. Oh, how I love this girl. I’ve loved her since Produce 101 and I really like that she’s been picking up acting, because she’s really good at it. I might have been a little bit disappointed with School 2017, I am SO glad she got casted in this. I enjoyed every single scene, her bubbliness and quirkiness just splashes off the screen and she just had me flying with the little ‘rawr’ ad libs and her drunken acting behavior. I read on DramaWiki that the role of Ha Ri was first offered to Jo Bo Ah, so I am IMMENSELY grateful that Se Jeong accepted it instead of her. She just made this drama, she was amazing, I loved her performance from beginning to end.
Ha Ri is just such a grounded character. She’s really rational and smart, she’s not passive, she doesn’t let herself get swept away in stuff without having a strong personal opinion about it. She feels herself falling for Tae Moo quite quickly, but she never oversteps her boundaries and she only allows herself to think about it once he’s made it clear that he has feelings for her. And even then, she is constantly considering the possibility of them being together, she has legit worries since they’re from different worlds. You can just see how she doesn’t allow herself to get swept up in her emotions, she continues to be as rational as possible. She’s not insecure about herself, she has a natural confidence and it’s not that she lets herself be compared to anyone else. I thought she was a really likeable main character and her chemistry with Ahn Hyo Seop was really good.

Talking about Ahn Hyo Seop, it hasn’t been too long since I finished Abyss, after which I mentioned in my review that he’s become one of my new favorite actors. This drama confirmed this once again. He has certainly proved his versatility in acting because he was a completely different person than in Abyss. I honestly felt a bit weird about him playing the handsome stoic CEO character in the beginning, but he actually pulled it off pretty well! He’s just such a puppy in my eyes, it was kind of refreshing to see him as this kind of mature business guy, but what amazed me the most was how he pulled off the passionate scenes. The kissing scenes between him and Se Jeong were AMAZING. Like, nothing left to be desired for me. Especially the final one at the end of the second-to-last episode, I was really vexed when it ended there and the next episode just started with the morning after. I was like NOOOO!! I have mentioned it before, but I’m a sucker for really good passionate kissing scenes and when they get good, I just don’t want them to end too abruptly, haha. Anyways, I think he showed yet another side of his acting, although I think I still prefer him as a puppy, I’m not ready to say goodbye to puppy Ahn Hyo Seop yet. T^T
Out of every character in this series, Tae Moo most definitely had the most character development. I mean, just look at how he was in episode 1 versus episode 12. The way his heart was opened up to Geum Hee/Ha Ri slowly but surely was really natural and satisfying to watch. You could just see how it became apparent that all this time he just never allowed himself to be happy, to look for more in life than just his work. He blamed himself for his parents’ deaths and it had just imprinted this idea in his brain that they wouldn’t want him to be happy after that, that his parents also blamed him, which was of course absurd. But Ha Ri was the one who opened his eyes to the fact that none of this was his fault and that he had every right to search for his own happiness, as much as anybody else. Their relationship went from simply cute to really heartwarming and I loved that.
I still have a couple of Ahn Hyo Seop dramas left on my to watch list, and there’s no doubt he will continue to appear in many more dramas in the near future, so I’m definitely here for that!

I recognized Kim Min Gyu from Because This Is My First Life, but I see he was also in Who Are You – School 2015, The Sound of Your Heart, Just Between Lovers, and also in a couple more that are on my soon-to-watch list. He has a very unique face! I’ve never seen this kind of role from him either, or at least such a main role, I suppose, but I liked his character in this series. Sung Hoon was really mature and rational, and his patience with Young Seo was admirable sometimes, haha. I liked the plot twist of him also being struck by love at first sight by her, because he didn’t let on that this was the case right from the start. It was just nice in general to see two main couples with such good chemistry, the kissing scenes between him and Seol In Ah were also really good. The focus was on the first main couple, but I do like that they also showed some scenes from the relationship between Young Seo and Sung Hoon, in that way the two main relationships were still levelled out, like in Fight For My Way, for example. Anyways, it was fun seeing him act in this drama because it also brought a funny side out of him and I got to see a new side to his acting, which was nice!

I’ve seen Seol In Ah in several dramas before, I immediately recognized her face. She appeared in Producer, Strong Woman Do Bong Soon, and even in School 2017 along with Se Jeong! Record of Youth is also still on my list. I really liked her performance in this drama. I think it’s the first time I’ve seen her play a main role, but she really impressed me. I just loved her friendship chemistry with Se Jeong, their interaction just looked so effortless it wouldn’t surprise me if they were really close in real life. Especially her drunken antics made me crack up every single time, the scene where Young Seo and Ha Ri were brought home by the police because they had gotten too drunk to walk by themselves was hilarious.
Young Seo is really the best loyal friend anyone could wish for. She may have her petty moments and her own issues to deal with, but she was always on Ha Ri’s side, there to comfort her and join her in cussing out annoying people. I loved that she was more than just ‘the main protagonist’s best friend’, she really had her own life, she didn’t exist purely as Ha Ri’s support system but she was always there for her when she needed it. I liked how she just made her relationship with Sung Hoon work, too, not caring about anyone else but just going for it, following her own heart. I really liked her, apart from that one scene where she acted like a spoiled child, I really just loved her.

Can I just give a shoutout to Lee Duk Hwa who played the Grandpa? I LOVED him in this series. I’ve seen him in several dramas before, like Hide, Jekyll, Me, Suspicious Partner and Go Go Waikiki, but he really cracked me up in this drama. It’s like, even when he was being strict, he always had this mischievous twinkle in his eye like he wasn’t really angry, he was just trying to lure people out of their shell. After Tae Moo’s backstory was revealed and that he was with his Grandpa that night when his parents died and his Grandpa was right there when he saw them lying there and was trying to cover his eyes and yelling out of sorrow for this horror, it really said a lot about Tae Moo’s relationship with his Grandpa. He had taken in his grandson without a second of hesitation and raised him as if he were his father and mother in one. He really was the best supporting family member for Tae Moo and I love how he was also so welcoming towards Sung Hoon, even calling him his ‘other grandson’. It was fun seeing him pretend like he couldn’t accept Ha Ri, even though we already know he would break at some point, because he couldn’t deny what the two were feeling for each other and come on, if Tae Moo had forgiven her for the whole Geum Hee think, if the two of them had already resolved things, then why should anyone else have any objections towards their relationship? In any case, I really liked the Grandpa and also how he got so invested in that drama series. Again, how they did not make a link any sooner that Geum Hee was a fake name, but he just went ‘Shin Geum Hee? Hey, what a coincidence, that’s the name of the female protagonist in my favorite show!’ I really liked his performance in this series.

I’ve seen the actors playing Ha Ri’s parents multiple times before too, but for the father it was the first time he actually played a character that I found sympathetic, haha. I feel like he always plays the nosy reporter guy, haha. Anyways, I’ve seen Kim Kwang Gyu before in Oh! My Lady, Sungkyunkwan Scandal, I Hear Your Voice, Pinocchio, Gogh The Starry Night, Hwarang: The Beginning and Thirty But Seventeen. I liked to see him as the soft-hearted dad, I don’t think I’ve ever seen him play a father before, to be honest. I think he did very well, I liked the scene at the end when Tae Moo has just asked them for their blessing in dating Ha Ri with marriage in mind, and he just expressed his honest feelings of being worried of his only daughter facing evil gossip and things like that. They had a real heart-to-heart right there, and it was nice to see MEN talking about their FEELINGS and WORRIES. Normalize that!
Jung Young Joo is such an iconic actress. I’ve seen her now in Cinderella and the Four Knights, Jugglers, That Man Oh Soo, My Mister, Gyeryong Fairytale and Move to Heaven. She’s so extra, she’s played such extra roles but then it’s always funny to me when she gets casted as a mom because then she just becomes this extra mom and I’m always like, how did the dad end up marrying a woman like that, haha. I really liked her as Ha Ri’s mom, though, because her extraness didn’t become too much. She wasn’t just a comical character, I think she established Ha Ri’s family situation very well. You could say she was just more of a ‘tough love’ kind of mom, haha.

All this time I was thinking where I recognized Ha Min from and when I looked it up I discovered that it’s Byung Chan from VICTON! I knew him from Produce X 101, so I wasn’t expecting him to appear in a drama. Anyways, that was nice. Although he didn’t have a very big role, I really liked how supportive he was of his sister’s relationship with Tae Moo and when Tae Moo asked for Ha Ri’s family’s permission, he was just being that ANTM’s Alasia meme in the background, haha. He was just the typical little brother character, but at least his relationship with Ha Ri was good, I liked how her there were no tensions in her family whatsoever, she just had a really good support system.

I haven’t seen any of Song Won Suk’s dramas before, but for some reason he still looks familiar to me? Anyways, he seemed like the typical guy to be cast as the first love of the female protagonist, kind face, good friendship. I just wished that whatever he truly felt towards Ha Ri had come out earlier, because now until the end I wasn’t sure what exactly his deal was with her. He kept rejecting her, he never came to her, and yet he started acting jealous as soon as she moved on, that seemed a little weird to me. Anyways, I think it was for the better that he and Ha Ri stayed friends, it suited them way better.

I’ll end with the dramatic Miss Jo Yoo Jung, played by Seo Hye Won. Again, she looked so familiar to me, but DramaWiki is again telling me I haven’t seen anything with her before. It says she’s a musical actress though, that’s interesting. And I also see she’s in True Beauty, so I will see her in that once I get around to watch that.

The only series I’ve seen Kim Hyun Sook in was Are You Human Too? where she played Reporter Jo. I see she was also the main character in that renzoku drama Rude Miss Young Ae (I’ve never seen it but I’ve seen the name more than enough times to guess that it’s probably a classic kind of sitcom?). Anyways, I liked her character here, with her awesome glasses. She was so stoic, it was funny to see her try to suppress her cute side with Mr. Gye after they became a couple, but she was definitely wearing the pants in the relationship.

I liked that there were many actors that I hadn’t seen before, or that I now saw as a more major character for the first time in this drama. It really brought back the nostalgia of the classic romcom K-Drama with the many misunderstandings in the beginning, but it’s really nice how they managed to keep it modern. It was reminiscent of how it used to be, but executed as how dramas have developed through the years. As I said, I liked how the ‘Be Strong, Shin Geum Hee’ drama that was playing in the background seemed like a literal reference to those old-fashioned romantic dramas and it’s funny how they also showed the advertisement to the webtoon it was based on at a bus stop in the first episode. There were multiple of these subtle references to classic K-Drama and opening the fourth wall to the viewers.

Lastly, I REALLY loved the soundtrack for this drama. I’ve heard so many songs that I’m going to look up again to download, because everything was so cute and beautiful and fit the concept of the drama so well. So my compliments for the OST arrangement, and I also liked how they got MeloMance to collab with them on this drama by even making a guest appearance!

So yeah, I think this wasn’t a particularly long review but it didn’t need to be because the story in itself is so light and simple that it doesn’t need a full in-depth analysis. I just really enjoyed it, series like this make me reconfirm why I love K-Dramas so much. I’m glad I decided to watch this now rather than wait, and it’s made me decide to catch up on some other more recent releases first too before moving on with my original list. I’ve just become so hyped by all these exciting new dramas!
I think it’s important to keep including dramas that don’t necessarily cover heavy emotional themes, but rather focus on stories that feature modern, simple relationships, because it just makes them so accessible and enjoyable to watch. I would definitely recommend this if you’re looking for a good, light romcom. The whole vibe of the show was fun, the acting was good and I really want to give bonus points for the chemistry between all the main characters, because some moments were literally s i z z l i n g to watch. I also wasn’t surprised to hear that it was adapted from a webtoon, like it really seemed like these characters could be inspired by webtoon characters, in terms of personality and the dynamics they had between each other. One of my favorite runnings gags was definitely the “archaeopteryx” as a reference to Tae Moo, like how the heck did he look like that?? But I liked that they kept it in and the little dino bird popped out of Ha Ri’s phone every time he called her. It was also fun to see how, as time progressed, she wouldn’t flinch back because of it, but she’d actually enjoy it whenever the archaeopteryx came calling.
I also like that it again featured a line of business that isn’t very mainstream as far as I know, food production and food research. It was nice that the main characters already had their mutual interest in food products in common once they really started getting to know each other. I always appreciate it when women working in science-related jobs are highlighted through these representations.

I will be back with a new review probably next month, because again I really want to take my time with the next one. I’m already excited to get back to you! ^^

Until then!

Disclaimer: this is a review, and as such it contains spoilers of the whole series. Please proceed to read at your own risk if you still plan on watching this show or if you haven’t finished it yet. You have been warned.

Love Alarm
(좋아하면 울리는 / Joahamyeon Ullineun / Ring If You Like)
MyDramaList rating (for both seasons): 7.0/10

Hello everyone! I’m back with a new review! It hasn’t been that long since my previous one, but I managed to finish this quite fast despite it having two seasons, since neither season has that many episodes and I had more free time last week. I had been curious to watch it for a while, because I noticed that it was hyped pretty much when it came out, but also that people overall weren’t very enthusiastic about it. I wanted to make my own decisions about it, so I decided to give it a try despite other people’s opinions. And I have to say, I’m probably going to be one of those people that actually have some good things to say about it. I actually liked it. I think it had a really good message in the end. I’m not sure why people weren’t satisfied with it, but I could really relate to the characters and their feelings and I think the ending was wrapped up really nicely, leaving me with no further questions. This review might be more positive than others, so if you’re up for that, let’s get going!

Love Alarm is a Netflix K-Drama with two seasons, Season 1 consisting of 8 episodes and Season 2 consisting of 6 episodes, and each episode is about an hour long. The story is about Kim Jo Jo (played by Kim So Hyun), a high school student. She lives in a time where a certain app is very popular, the Joalarm (Love Alarm) app. When you install this app, it synchs with your heart, and it can ‘ring’ the Joalarm of the person you like if you’re in a 10 meter radius of them and vice versa. It’s a very handy way to determine whether you have feelings for someone and the other way around. No wonder it’s very popular among high school students, because it elevates the excitement of school romance. The Joalarm doesn’t lie, it will ring when someone near you likes you, but it doesn’t give you a name, it’s just a signal detector. Jo Jo doesn’t have this app initially, mainly because she has more important things on her mind. I’ll explain more in detail later, but in a nutshell: she lost her parents when she was very young, she’s been living with her grandmother ever since. When her grandmother got sick and they had to move to Seoul to get her into a good hospital, she moved in with her aunt and cousin from her mother’s side. She’s been doing nothing but pay off debts to her aunt and her grandmother’s hospital bills, and she works two part-time jobs after school in secret. Since she officially isn’t allowed to work part-time as a high school student, she even lies to her friends about it, says she’s attending an afterschool academy to study harder. So yeah, she’s having a tough time and she doesn’t really have time to think about Joalarm because there’s not even anyone she’s interested in. She does have a boyfriend in the beginning of the series, but she can’t seem to put effort in their relationship and he’s the only one showing his affection. As if her life isn’t already stressful enough, it only gets more extreme when Hwang Sun Oh (played by Song Kang) transfers to her school. He’s the handsome rich son of a politician running for mayor and a famous actress, and he’s a model who just returned from America.
Sun Oh lives in a very big house with his parents, and also with Lee Hye Yeong (played by Jung Ga Ram) and his mom. Hye Yeong and his mom have been living with Sun Oh’s family since the two boys were little, they needed a place to stay and they are helping around the house in return for staying there. Hye Yeong works at one of the part-time jobs that Jo Jo works at, and we immediately see that he has a thing for her. He always looks out for her, and while he doesn’t approach her directly or even talk to her, he always makes sure that she gets home/on the bus safely and he’s satisfied by just watching her smile from a distance. When Sun Oh returns, he immediately notices his best friend’s behavior towards this girl and he also becomes interested in her. Although it first seems as if he just wants to know what Hye Yeong sees in her, he ends up falling for her as well. In contrast to Hye Yeong, Sun Oh is VERY straightforward with his intentions, and he manages to sweep Jo Jo off her feet within the first week of meeting her. Hye Yeong sees this happen and silently resigns. He won’t even admit to Sun Oh that he has feelings for Jo Jo because he doesn’t want to get in his friend’s way (even though he liked her first). Jo Jo eventually installs Joalarm and through the app, her and Sun Oh’s feelings for each other are confirmed.

This is where it all starts, with Jo Jo and Sun Oh falling for each other.
In the beginning, I was a bit confused as to what everyone’s intentions were. I didn’t understand why Hye Yeong kept denying that he had feelings for Jo Jo even though it was so obvious. And I also wondered why Sun Oh went after Jo Jo in the first place. At first, I really thought he just wanted to check her out as his best friend’s wingman to see what kind of person she was, to see if he could see what Hye Yeong saw in her. But then he came on so strong and even kissed her like that in the first episode, and that really made me go… Okay, what? Because it almost seemed like he was seducing her on purpose, while knowing Hye Yeong had feelings for her, maybe to prove to his friend that she wouldn’t be suitable for him because she’d agreed to kiss him so easily? Or something? These were explanations that went through my mind. But apparently, he’d already become romantically interested in her within a couple of days. Jo Jo’s narration at this point did say that the kiss came before the feelings, so even if she’d had the Joalarm, it wouldn’t have rang, and neither did his. But it did all happen pretty fast after that.

The kissing thing then blows up at school because Jo Jo’s friend Kim Jang Go (played by Z.Hera) sees them and sends a picture to Jo Jo’s boyfriend, Il Shik (played by Shin Seung Ho), since she is in love with him herself. Because of this, and the fact that Jo Jo had been hiding so many parts of her private life from her friends, Jang Go starts ignoring her at school. Jo Jo becomes completely isolated and Sun Oh is the sole person to give her solace. As we see it from Jo Jo’s perspective, he is like the one light at the end of the dark tunnel for her. He is so sweet and caring at that point and I was so happy for her that she at least had one person like that because apart from him, she was all alone in the dark.
In the meantime, there’s also her cousin Park Gul Mi (played by Go Min Shi), one of the most popular girls in school, who keeps blaming Jo Jo for everything that goes wrong in her life. Gul Mi develops a crush on Sun Oh, as does everyone else, but when he and Jo Jo get together, she blames Jo Jo again for ‘taking him away from her’.

Honestly, I cannot think of a character that I’ve pitied more than Jo Jo. In reviews I only find people commenting on that they find her unrelatable and annoying, but I could really see where she was coming from. Despite seeming like a cheerful person, Jo Jo carries a deep trauma with her, one that has such a strong hold on her that she can never seem to escape from it no matter what she tries. She’s always felt like a burden, and the reason for this is so completely unfair and not her fault. At some point we find out that her parents attempted to commit a family suicide with her when they were still living on Jeju Island when she was little. By chance, she survived because she woke up in time and vomited out the stuff they gave her, but it was too late for her parents. After walking and running for a long time, she reached her grandmother’s place, but ever since she started living at her aunt’s, she’s always felt like she was imposing, because they always make her feel like she’s imposing and even mooching off of them.
It made me SO mad how Gul Mi talked to her, putting everything on her like that and even making her feel like she was the one who killed her parents. She kept threatening to ‘tell them what happened in Jeju’ as if Jo Jo committed some sort of crime. Gul Mi didn’t even fully understand what had happened and how Jo Jo was feeling about it, but she stopped at nothing to make her feel horrible.
So yeah, Jo Jo doesn’t exactly have a very warm environment and I’m still surprised at how she kept going. Some people would’ve already given in to depression and despair, and Jo Jo might have been dealing with these things as well, but she never let them get so far that she’d harm herself and this is something that makes her very strong. However, every person has a limit and people constantly kept pushing her towards hers.

In the first couple of episodes, everything seems to be smooth-sailing for Jo Jo and Sun Oh, it’s clear they like each other very much and they make a cute couple. But then, everything changes when they get into an accident during a school trip to Jeju Island. After finally deciding to go on the trip (Jo Jo initially doesn’t want to because of the bad memories she has of the place) they decide to go for each other. After a small fire breaks out in Jo Jo’s dorm which triggers her trauma, they go on a drive on Sun Oh’s motorbike but they crash. After this, Jo Jo can’t get in touch with Sun Oh for a few days and beats herself up over hurting him like that. It is in this desperate moment, where she is very triggered and overwhelmed, that her classmate Chon Duk Goo (played by Lee Jae Eung) gives her an exclusive item to install on her Love Alarm, a Shield. If you install this, your signal won’t reach the person you like, so it’s a way to protect your feelings from being exposed. She chooses to install it. She regrets it the minute she does, but it can only be taken off by the developer. So when Sun Oh finally appears in front of her again, she has ‘proof’ to break up with him – she doesn’t ring his Joalarm anymore.
The reason why she had to break up with Sun Oh is until this moment not very clear to me. In my opinion, it didn’t have to get to that. But I do understand that she was triggered enough by hurting the one person that got close to her, that she felt like she had to hide again. I think it was mainly a trauma response, but it was a real shame how it went.
Of course, Sun Oh is the most shocked of all, because how can her feelings for him suddenly be gone? He asks her time and time again to open the app again, to try again, but it’s no use. Jo Jo ends up breaking Sun Oh’s heart.

Some time goes by, I believe it’s now somewhere after high school graduation and before college admission. By this time, Joalarm 2.0 is about to be launched, and only members of the Joalarm Badge Club (people with a minimum of 3,000 hearts) are allowed to join. In the meantime, Jo Jo has started an Instagram account where she uploads beautiful but eerie illustrations under the name ‘The Ringing World’. These drawings are based on her own past, and story, but also inspired by the effects of Joalarm on society. As the artist she remains anonymous, but her drawings become very popular.
It’s around this time that she meets Sun Oh again. He is now dating a famous influencer/fashion designer, Lee Yook Jo (played by Kim Shi Eun), but he can’t ring her Joalarm. As Jo Jo tries to avoid Sun Oh, Hye Yeong comes back into the picture. He spots Jo Jo a few times and is determined to take his shot the old-fashioned way, without using the app. He tries to get to know her by simply approaching her personally. At this point, Jo Jo only knows him by face and name as Sun Oh’s friend from high school.
Sun Oh finds out that Hye Yeong is approaching Jo Jo and the two guys also start to grow apart.
Although this part of the series doesn’t last very long, it’s important to note that around this time, more and more controversy is happening around Joalarm. There have been several murder cases that were allegedly inspired by the app, and even a mass suicide of a group of more than 20 people, causing Anti-Joalarm protests to arise more frequently.

I will talk about this more elaborately later, but I think this was a very important part of the story. Because of course, there are multiple sides to everything. This Joalarm app, however romantic and exciting it might sound to some people, can also drive you crazy with loneliness. If it works out for you, it’s nothing but great. But it can also make you feel like an outcast if it doesn’t. It can make you feel unloved. I mean, it literally says ‘no one in a 10m radius loves you’, which can be quite depressing to hear. At this point, people are waging so much on this app, it’s become a part of society, people are using it for everything. Even at weddings it’s now become custom that, everyone shuts down their Joalarm at the end of the ceremony except for the bride and groom so that they can make sure they actually love each other for real. It’s become such a defining thing. And this is what made this series so Black Mirror for me. It did from the start, and especially when the mass suicide happened and things started going sideways as people started getting the wrong kind of inspiration from the app, but it really shows us the dark side of technology. The side that is masked by all the excitement and all the hype that buzzes around it. The app becomes the thing that determines how you feel, not the other way around, and this is very dangerous.

Now what we have figured out by now, is that Chon Duk Goo, Jo Jo’s former classmate, is actually the developer of Joalarm. He created it in order to confess his feelings to the girl he liked, which happens to be Gul Mi. But after Gul Mi shows her disgust when Duk Goo rings her Joalarm, Duk Goo also becomes concerned about the use of the app, and we even see him jump out of his own window one time, suggesting that he ends his own life. It turns out that this was a failed attempt, but he did have to recover and left Joalarm in the hands of his older brother while he was recovering. His older brother, Brian Chon (played by Ki Do Hoon) is the one who goes along with the Joalarm 2.0, even though Duk Goo actually told him not to. The new function on Joalarm 2.0 is that you can see all the people who will come to love you in the future, so people who have budding feelings for you. The idea is to stop people from feeling lonely when there’s no one in a 10m radius, to give them hope that they will still meet people who will love them later on.
The presentation of Joalarm 2.0 is where Season 1 ends, with excitement going on inside the hall whereas outside a bunch of protestors (led in megaphone by someone who I still think is Duk Goo) makes a fuss.

Tiny point of critique: the transition from Season 1 to 2 isn’t very smooth. Season 1 ends with a very clear cliffhanger, them all coincidentally meeting at the presentation of Joalarm 2.0. Season 2 suddenly starts some time later, at a random different moment in time. I kept thinking that I wanted to know how that meeting at the end of Season 1 had ended! Suddenly we are somewhere else, and even though they do talk about it, that the meeting happened, I would’ve liked it if Season 2 had just picked up directly from where Season 1 had ended.

Anyways, Season 2 starts just after Joalarm 2.0 has been launched and by now we’ve had another time jump – Jo Jo is now in college and Hye Yeong has moved out of Sun Oh’s house. The two have started dating. Hye Yeong is the sweetest boyfriend ever, he’s so incredibly patient and considerate. He’s even fine with the fact that she can’t ring his Alarm. He doesn’t know about the Shield, but he is willing to wait for as long as it takes to gain her affection. Meanwhile, he makes it his personal goal to ring Jo Jo’s Alarm 10 times a day to make her feel loved. In other words, he’s too good for the world.
Jo Jo’s feelings towards him are definitely growing, but she still can’t seem to open up to him 100%. She still has too much holding her back. She’s still living with her aunt and Gul Mi, she still hasn’t dealt with her trauma, Sun Oh starts approaching her again about what happened in high school. She can’t seem to move on as she’d like and just focus on her relationship with Hye Yeong. She knows that ultimately, she will have to tell him about the Shield and why she installed it in the first place, but she keeps putting it off. In the meantime, she tries to track down Duk Goo, as she now knows he’s the developer, to ask him to take off the Shield. But Brian Chon says it’s impossible to take it down and Duk Goo himself is still nowhere to be found. Now Jo Jo is in a pickle because she regrets installing the Shield so much. If only she had Joalarm to figure out her feelings for her, but now she can’t do that. What she does get from an anonymous number (again, thank you Duk Goo), is another exclusive item to use on her app: a Spear. With this Spear, she can send a Joalarm signal to a person of her choice, one that pierces through the Shield. She decides to send it to Hye Yeong, and by doing this she unknowingly creates a shift – she uses her own volition to send it to someone of her own choice, without using the app’s instructions of whom to send it to.

I really don’t want to go into too much summary details, I think I’ve already done that enough up until now, so this is where I want to move on to my analysis of the story. Starting with the event that I just described, of Jo Jo using her own volition. When he returns to Joalarm, Duk Goo tells his brother Brian the reason why he didn’t want him to continue with Joalarm 2.0 and he uses Jo Jo as a case example.
However romantic and exciting the idea of the app might be, fact remains that it takes away people’s own volition in choosing who to love. The app, although it’s just meant to be a signal indicator and detector, is starting to interfere with people’s decisions. Also with the Joalarm 2.0 function to see people who will love you in the future, Duk Goo emphasizes that people are not willing to look past the possibilities that the app provides. They won’t look further than these indicated recommended people. He compares it to an algorhythm that shows us what movies to watch, we won’t look past it and just choose from the suggested assortment. People were unconsciously eliminating hundreds of possibilities by choosing to follow exactly what the app was showing them.
The fact that the developer of the app came to this conclusion after carefully observing what it did to people was just so powerful to me. You could see that Duk Goo had really reflected and learned from his own experiences. He wasn’t just some bitter guy that couldn’t deal with the fact that the girl he liked, the girl that inspired him to create Joalarm, didn’t like him back. He went as far as to help people like Jo Jo who got caught up in it as well. Hearing his character say these things just made me nod my head in agreement because that’s exactly what it was, it just analyzed the full picture of Joalarm, the good and the bad. As I mentioned before, when Jo Jo was regretting the Shield and thought that without Joalarm, she wouldn’t be able to make a decision, it just became clear to me how much everyone in this story was depending on it. How convenient to not even have to look inside your own heart anymore to determine how you feel – now you have a machine to do that for you, too. It might be a great invention, but it also takes away people’s will to actively pursue someone regardless of the feelings of both parties. It takes away the thrill in the chase. And most of all, it takes away the need to tell each other that you love them. The words ‘I love you’ have literally been replaced by the sound of Joalarm. And that’s why I found it so beautiful that at the end of the series, when Jo Jo and Hye Yeong confirm their feelings for each other for real, Hye Yeong reminds her that they shouldn’t forget to tell each other ‘I love you’ as much as possible. Because by then, it has become such an unfamiliar phrase. It has become something that people didn’t say anymore because Joalarm said it for them.

I want to talk a bit about a couple of main characters in more detail before I move on to the cast comments. One thing I liked about this drama is how well it showed that everyone and everything has multiple sides to them. You may see a story from one side, but there’s always a truth from another side somewhere. You never know what people are carrying with them, so don’t judge a book by its cover.
I’ll start with Jo Jo. As I said before, she is probably one of the most pitiful characters I’ve seen in a K-Drama in a long time. Her life just seems so unfair. As if it isn’t enough that she went through something so traumatic as a child and is still suffering the repercussions of that daily, the people around her also don’t go easy on her at all. It really seems as if she can’t catch a break, as if everything she touches falls apart. That’s what it looks like to herself, and that’s why she can’t seem to stop beating herself up. Even when she finds happiness in her relationship with Sun Oh, and then with Hye Yeong, she can never get herself to fully acknowledge that she deserves this happiness. She’s constantly reminded of her past and she constantly feels like she’s a burden to other people and it’s horrible that a person should feel like that.
I didn’t read that many reviews, but I read enough to learn that many people seem to have been annoyed by Jo Jo’s character, that they didn’t like her and when I started, I was worried that I might feel the same. I was worried that it would get super frustrating, that she wouldn’t be able to make up her mind and remain passive throughout it all. But she actually got her act together! It takes a while, yes, and it takes two final bombs to drop. The first one is Hye Yeong finding out about the Shield. He overhears a conversation between her and Brian Chon and loses faith in her sincerity. The second one is that some guy is arrested for the Joalarm-inspired murder cases. He claims that he was inspired by Jo Jo’s Ringing World illustrations, believing them to be some sort of prediction or prophecy that he had to fulfill, causing Jo Jo to even be partially blamed for these murders. And this is where she decides to get herself together. She writes a public post in which she openly reveals herself as the illustrator and what the drawings mean to her, she even opens up about her past. She meets Sun Oh to have a closure talk. She then messages Hye Yeong that she will come clean to him about everything after doing one last thing, and for this thing she has to travel back to Jeju. She participates in a marathon and during this marathon, she finally confronts her trauma.
The most beautiful thing about this is, again, the plurality of it. First, we hear Jo Jo’s narration say, ‘It’s not because I hated you, you were just too heavy’, played over a scene where young Jo Jo leaves her teddy bear behind as she’s walking away from her house. But after actually facing her trauma in the form of her younger self, these words are repeated and it’s like she’s saying it to herself, to the young version of herself. And this made so much sense. Instead of carrying that young girl, that trauma with her all the way while hating it and wanting her/it to go away, she ends up literally embracing her. This scene really made me tear up a little, because despite Jo Jo’s slightly passive and anxious behavior throughout the series, this was the time when she showed the most determination to get her act together. She finished the marathon and there was Hye Yeong waiting for her at the end. She managed to overcome her own issues by herself, and she managed to get with Hye Yeong by her own volition. She may have installed the Shield for Sun Oh, but Hye Yeong made her want to take it away.
And of course the final most gratifying scene was where we get to see Jo Jo’s Joalarm log, so we get to see in which cases she would’ve rang Hye Yeong’s Joalarm if she didn’t have the Shield, and we see all these scenes between her and Hye Yeong. All these scenes in which she wondered if his signal would’ve gone off if she’d had the Alarm. And I also liked that she had a final talk with Duk Goo, and that he told her that the only thing keeping her from giving in to her love for Hye Yeong was that she was afraid because she couldn’t ring his Alarm. She didn’t have that confirmation, and that made her doubt her feelings. Because the signal wasn’t there, she couldn’t be sure if it would’ve rang if it had been there. And that’s exactly what I mentioned before, that’s what Joalarm took away from people, that certainty in their own feelings.
Anyways, I just want to say that even though at some points I did feel like she had to express her feelings more clearly, I was not annoyed by Jo Jo whatsoever. Her responses seemed legit if you looked at where she was coming from, I completely understood that it was hard for her in particular to be honest about that sort of thing when she felt like her whole existence was a burden to the world. I think it’s important to focus on how well she managed to get out, despite suffering from trauma and depression, how she kept going on her own and eventually managed to face her past and her trauma all by herself and got to go back to the most loving guy in the world.

As a child, Sun Oh has also had it tough. His family may be famous, but they’re definitely not a happy close family. The family dynamic reminded me of the one from Radio Romance, where they were just pretending to be a happy and perfect family, but it was all scripted. At least Sun Oh didn’t lead a scripted life, he did everything he could to rebel against his parents, he had enough freedom for that. Hye Yeong really is the closest person he had, it’s like he has a personal bodyguard in his best friend. So I can understand that, when Hye Yeong shows interest in a girl, Sun Oh would also be interested in her, as a brother would be interested in his younger brother’s crush. But I still don’t understand what made him confront Jo Jo like that. Of course, in the first episode we don’t know about Sun Oh’s back story yet, so I have to say that when he first appeared, I didn’t have a lot of sympathy for him. He seemed pretty snobby, like he just assumed that everyone would fall on their knees for him. He didn’t blink twice at receiving 10+ hearts as soon as he walked into his new school, and when he approached and kissed Jo Jo like that in that alley, a red flag went up because he was doing it while knowing that his best friend had feelings for her. I’m still not sure what he was thinking there, if it was because he really was romantically interested in Jo Jo already at that point, or because he was trying to test or prove something (but what, then?). It just didn’t feel right. But after that, suddenly his charms just became undeniable. He wanted nothing but for Jo Jo to be happy, he may have flaunted his privilege around a bit but his intentions turned out to be really good. You could tell he really loved Jo Jo, and this didn’t change even going into Season 2, where he still couldn’t ring anyone else’s Alarm because of this.
I felt bad for him when Jo Jo suddenly broke up with him like that, because it really was a one-sided decision and she didn’t explain anything to him (one of my least favorite tropes). But then when he just didn’t seem to be able to move on, even when she got together with Hye Yeong, and he kept approaching her even though he knew he was making her uncomfortable… I mean, I understand, I really do, he needed the closure as much as she did, but I still found myself thinking that he should just let it go. He had a really cool girlfriend who, like Hye Yeong, didn’t even mind waiting until he would be able to ring her Alarm. I’m glad he managed to save his relationship with her, in the end, but it did take having that closure talk with Jo Jo for him to decide that he could finally move on and that he wanted to make an effort for Yook Jo.

On how many occasions can we say that the second male lead actually got the girl? I don’t think there are many, but Hye Yeong managed to do it! He really worked himself up from nowhere! Honestly, he was the person who loved her the most from the start and he let so many people go first, he didn’t even become petty when Sun Oh snatched her away from him (not that she was his, but you know what I mean, it would’ve been a normal response to get petty and jealous). In the beginning, when they were already making a love triangle out of them, it felt wrong because Jo Jo didn’t even know Hye Yeong yet, she knew him by face from school and her part-time job, but she’d never talked to him before and she definitely did not know he had a crush on her. So in the beginning it just seemed like Hye Yeong didn’t even stand a chance against Sun Oh. But I really love how the tables turned and how Hye Yeong found a way to bypass Joalarm. In regular K-Drama, the second male lead never gets the girl especially because he chooses the old-fashioned way of being patient. In this scenario, this actually worked out for the best. He managed to leave such a big impression on Jo Jo through his sincerity that even she decided to disregard what Joalarm may or may not have been telling her and she voluntarily chooses him of her own accord. It’s hard to believe that there’s any real person out there as kind as Hye Yeong. Honestly, he had so many reasons to be angry and to spite people but he never did. He always chose to be kind. Even when his back story was revealed and it turned out that his father was in prison for murder and that he might get out on parole, and he actually started doubting his own good nature because he was scared he would be like his father, and I was just like, ‘Bro… you literally have 0,00000% evil in you!!’. He was so unbelievably good and I felt so anxious for him whenever it seemed like Jo Jo would take a step back.
I love how they managed to put that one scene in perspective by the way, when Jo Jo suddenly disappeared from Hye Yeong’s list of people who would love him in the future. He interpreted it as that she suddenly wouldn’t be able to love him anymore – and as it happened because Sun Oh kissed her at that moment, we’re all led to think that it’s because she’s going to choose Sun Oh after all. But at the end it’s clarified that that was the moment where Jo Jo’s feelings for Hye Yeong were confirmed. Sun Oh kissed her, and all she could think about was Hye Yeong. The reason that she disappeared from the list was because she wasn’t someone who ‘would love him in the future’ anymore. She’d started loving him in the present. That was such a great revelation. It’s quite smart of the writers to reveal in hindsight how much she actually already loved Hye Yeong without even being aware of it herself.
Anyways, Hye Yeong is a saint. Even when he finds out that Jo Jo hid the story about the Shield for him, he doesn’t even get angry with her, he just tells her that he wanted her to be sincere, that was enough for him. And as soon as she figures her stuff out, he’s right there, back by her side again. All I can say is that I’m happy for both him and Jo Jo that they managed to find each other, that they managed to actually slowly build up an ‘old-fashioned’ romance in a world where love is normally determined through an app.

Park Gul Mi is, until the end, my least favorite character in this series. While she did become kinder to Jo Jo and even started standing up for her more, the way she treated Duk Goo until the very end was just unbelievable to me. She is a very selfish person. From the start, when she’s still in high school and practices to become an idol trainee, it’s clear that she only cares about appearances. She joins the bandwagon of Sun Oh fangirls without hesitation and doesn’t even want to consider the possibility of him not reciprocating her feelings because, after all, “she’s so pretty”. That’s really all there is to her. She is disgusted by Duk Goo and when he keeps ringing her Joalarm, she even gets a little threatening to him. Despite her own life in which she’s allowed to do whatever she wants by her mom, even though they don’t have a lot of money, she blames everything that doesn’t go as planned on Jo Jo. She’s always yelling at her, always saying mean things and her mother always just happens to come in whenever Jo Jo tries to say or do something back, so it’s never Gul Mi’s fault. Until her mother does walk in one time when Gul Mi is cussing Jo Jo out and then the dynamic changes a bit. Gul Mi becomes a bit of a disappointment to her mother when everything she tries fails, first the trainee thing, then the online shopping channel.
Gul Mi’s sole goal becomes to meet the developer of Joalarm, to join the Joalarm Badge Club. For what purpose, who knows, she’s not thinking ahead of that, she just wants to be in the center of attention. However, in order to do that, she’ll need to gain 10% of 3,000 hearts (which is the minimum amount to get into the Badge Club) and then he’ll let her on the Hot People list. She goes for it, fakes it until she makes it to make people send her hearts. Only to be confronted with Duk Goo when she actually makes it into the club. And instead of reflecting on her actions, reflecting on how she treated Duk Goo and how fake her ambitions are, she treats him the exact same way as she did in high school. I was too stunned to speak during this scene. Like, it’s not that I expected her to suddenly like him, but to at least feel some humility? I mean, come on, SHE was the initial inspiration for Joalarm! Without her, the whole app wouldn’t have been made! But no, she doesn’t get humble. Rather, she goes into another direction to ask for attention by continuing to spread the news that she is in fact the “muse” of the developer to create Joalarm, even after cussing said developer out in his face because he still isn’t worthy of her.
I really don’t mean to be disrespectful about the character, but to me Gul Mi showed the least change and maturity of all the characters in this series. She literally didn’t care about anyone else’s feelings, she just wanted the virtual proof that people ‘loved’ her. Popularity and fame meant everything to her, and she was obsessed with getting hearts, she didn’t even care from whom she got them as long as they got her up in the ranks. You could say that she was one of the sheep that just went along with the virtual technology without really feeling the need to make their own decisions when it came to finding what they truly wanted to do. She was someone who didn’t mind remaining empty inside as long as she could fill that void with virtual hearts.

Chon Duk Goo is definitely one of the key characters of this series. In high school, he is this short and geeky looking guy who just wants his crush to be happy, but then can’t help but feel hurt when she expresses her disgust for him. All the more because he can’t stop loving her. Even when they meet again in the end, years later, he still rings her Alarm. It’s so ironic that the person who created Joalarm ends up as one of the ‘victims’ of it. I mean, he did jump out of his window. They didn’t elaborate on why he did that per se, and how he disappeared and then suddenly came back, but his brother took over the company in his absence. Duk Goo learned his lesson with the app and even objected the idea of version 2.0 because he realized how it took away people’s own volition to determine their own feelings. I think he was a very responsible developer, he really thought about the good and the bad, and not just about making money out of it. He was really thinking of the feelings of the people who would use it, and that made him a very kind person. I liked that he had this sort of kindred spirit thing going on with Jo Jo, it’s like they just understood each other and he even gave her those Shield and Spear tools to help her figure her stuff out. He didn’t use her as a test subject, he really wanted to help her. And I also like how he was able to face Gul Mi after all that time, although I couldn’t blame him for being surprised when she still cussed him out like that. I mean, you’d think a person would’ve changed at least a little since high school. Anyways, Duk Goo was really important and he may have steered Jo Jo a little in her decision to use the Shield, but in the end it was really the right decision for her to do so since it allowed her a way out of the system, as you could say.

Let me move on to my cast comments!

Kim So Hyun, my girl. I’ve been watching dramas with her since she was still a child actress and I think I say this every time, but I’m so proud of how much she’s grown. She’s her own lead actress now, still only 22 years old, but she already has mastered such layers of emotional acting it still surprises me. I’ve seen her in a bunch of stuff, as a younger version of a lead character in The Moon That Embraces The Sun, Rooftop Prince, I Miss You, I Hear Your Voice, The Girl Who Sees Smells, Goblin, and then as a lead character in Who Are You – School 2015 (in which she played a double role), Page Turner, Let’s Fight Ghost, Ruler – Master of the Mask, and Radio Romance. The Tale of Nokdu and River Where The Moon Rises are still on my list as well. I think she did really well in this series. Although I can understand where people are coming from with their critiques, as her way of acting can leave things to be desired and I remember I personally wasn’t very impressed with her performance in Radio Romance, but I think that she did very well in portraying the layers of Jo Jo’s character. I think she portrayed very well the cautiousness of feeling happy while expecting it to fall to pieces at any time, and when it did, the need to immediately pull back and hide. She has very expressive eyes as well, and I feel like she always has to do a lot of crying (her role in I Miss You, oh my god). I would like to see more different sides to her acting, that’s true, but I can’t say that it bothered me in this case and I was just glad that her character chose to be strong and determined in the end. If she’d only remained passive and gloomy, it would’ve been more frustrating for me to watch, but the way it ended made up for a lot.

This is actually the first drama I’ve seen of Song Kang! (edit: Okay, I need to take this back because I see that he was in The Liar and His Lover, but I kind of reppressed that one.) There are still a couple of dramas with him on my to watch list, so I’ll be looking forward to those! I think he was a good choice for the role of Sun Oh, not just because of his looks, but I think he also showed a lot of variety and layers to his character. He has the most adorable smile, but he can also look so hurt and angry it’s almost intimidating. I’d really have to see more of his acting performances to make a good judgement, but I did like him in this. Even though I said that I thought he was kind of snobby in the first episode, I also couldn’t blame Jo Jo for being enticed by him because he was definitely very charming even though he seemed a little dominant and I didn’t completely trust him. I am looking forward to seeing him in Nevertheless and Forecasting Love and Weather, and I might even watch Navillera if I’m in the mood for it because it seems pretty good.

Love it when a hyped K-Drama has a bunch of actors that I’ve never seen before. Jung Ga Ram is such an actor, I haven’t seen anything of him but I loved him in this series. As I said, I was beyond excited to find out that the second male lead would actually get the girl this time. We’ve all been waiting for this to happen! I just really like how he portrayed Hye Yeong, he was so kind and patient and he has such a kind face, too. I can hear people argue about that his looks may not win over Sun Oh’s, but that made it all the more satisfying to me because that’s what it was going for. Looking past the surface, looking past the screen. It took time for Jo Jo to completely fall for him, as it’s supposed to go. Loving someone shouldn’t be decided by a ringtone, it takes time to get to know each other and as you fall in love with a person, they’ll become more and more attractive in your eyes automatically. That’s how I’ve experienced it, in any case. That’s what made their relationship all the more real to me, you could really see that his efforts paid off, he had won Jo Jo’s feelings because of who he was, his kindness, how he was always there for her no matter what. No forcing, just someone willing to take it as slow as needed, and that’s what made him the most ideal guy to me, too. I really liked his performance in this, I hope he’ll do more dramas in the future!

Go Min Shi seems so familiar to me, but I can’t figure out where I know her from! The only two things I’ve seen her in are Age of Youth 2 and Go Go Waikiki, but I remember her from neither. Anyways, as we say, if you hate a character then it means that the actor did a good job. I really wanted to like Gul Mi, I wanted to find an aspect of her to like, to say, ‘See! She’s a good person after all!’, but it didn’t really come this time. I guess it just shows that there’s different kinds of people! If she’d been like everyone else, it would’ve been boring, and this way there was even a comical aspect to her character because she was just so obsessed with her ranking that she just went a little crazy, haha. I see that she and Kim So Hyun actually differ 5 years from each other, I wouldn’t have said that. Anyways, as an evil step-sister turned slightly less evil in the end, I suppose she did well, haha.
And I’ll immediately go on to point out Park Sung Yeon, there she was again! I’ve been seeing her in every drama series I’ve watched the last month. In this series she played Jo Jo’s aunt, and while she was a bit of an unpleasant character in the beginning as she always chose her daughter’s side, she did become more apologetic and sympathetic towards Jo Jo eventually. I love how she ended up being able to go on a group hiking trip and was all excited about it. She must have felt really limited in her freedom as well with these two girls to take care of and she may not have always dealt with it so well, but in the end it was clear that she changed perspectives and didn’t blame Jo Jo for her sister’s death anymore. Just to clarify, I’ve seen Park Sung Yeon recently in Abyss and Arthdal Chronicles. She’s also in some series that I’m interested in watching, so I hope I’ll be able to see more of her. By the way, I noticed that she doesn’t even have her own DramaWiki page! D:< She’s done more than enough to earn one so I might even make it myself. Don’t let this actress be unacknowledged!

I also hadn’t seen Lee Jae Eung anywhere before, but apparently this is the only drama series he’s done so far, he’s more of a movie actor. I found him a very interesting choice for this role, because following typical K-Drama standards, his visuals would automatically nominate him for the ‘loser’ role. I really don’t want to sound mean when I say this, I actually see it as a good thing. This is what Duk Goo was made out to be in the series and I just want to appreciate that they’re not solely choosing actors based on their ‘good looks’. I was really happy to find out he didn’t actually die after jumping from his window, and that he was able to re-emerge as the influential person that he’d become – the founding developer of Love Alarm, the app that had taken over the country. It’s just a bit of a shame that he created it for Gul Mi and was then treated like that. I would probably feel like that was a bit of a waste, haha. Anyways, I like how genuine he portrayed his character, he was really timid but also very sharp and he saw things exactly the way they were, he wasn’t naive or anything like that. He saw things that the main characters maybe felt but hadn’t even mustered up the courage to put into words yet. I really liked his talk at the end about people losing their own volition to the app and how they weren’t looking beyond the surface anymore, it was really strong and accurate. It’s certainly something we can learn from today as well.
Taking another side track here, Duk Goo’s brother Brian Chon was actually played by Ki Do Hoon, the guy who played Yangcha in Arthdal Chronicles!! I remember I’d seen that he was in Love Alarm, but it still took me a while to recognize him without his face mask on, haha.

I feel like it’s been ages since I saw Song Sun Mi in a drama, but it actually hasn’t been that long, haha. She was in Start-Up playing Suzy’s mom, and I also know her from Personal Preference and Lookout. She was pretty enigmatic as Sun Oh’s mom, because initially it really didn’t seem like she cared much for her son, but she did seem to choose his side more than her husband’s, especially when the latter turned out to be cheating on her. She even suggested on mutliple occasions that she’d help Sun Oh get Jo Jo back, and I was concerned she’d actually pull some strings to get involved in her son’s business more, also when he’d told her that Jo Jo chose Hye Yeong and she was eyeing Hye Yeong’s mother in that specific way… But she ended up doing nothing. I think she kind of found her own peace in the way she was living, even after being humiliated by the news of her husband’s cheating. It was nice seeing her act a little more warmly towards Sun Oh at the end, but they still never became a really warm family.
In this she was the complete opposite of Hye Yeong’s mother, played by Shim Yi Young. I see that she was in Mary Stayed Out All Night but I barely remember anything from this series, it’s been way too long. She was also in Legend of the Blue Sea, though, and in Thirty But Seventeen. I recognized her face, but I suppose I remember her slightly from the latter. Anyways, she was such a warm and loving mother to Hye Yeong. I still don’t know exactly what happened that made them end up at Sun Oh’s family house, except that it had something to do with Hye Yeong’s dad going to prison, but it didn’t seem like there was any weird or bad tension between them. Hye Yeong’s mom was so sweet, and the only time we see her show any kind of sorrow is when they’re talking about his father. You can really see where Hye Yeong gets his good manners and kind nature, he may have been worried about resembling his dad visually, but he got his character from his mom and we’re all glad he did.

I just flipped out when I realized that Sun Oh’s manager Kim Min Jae was played by the same guy who played the female lead’s mentally challenged brother in Melting Me Softly! I kept wondering where I knew him from, I’m so sorry mister Yoon Na Moo. T^T

Also, although she only appeared in Season 1, I was really happy to see Z.Hera again! She played Jo Jo’s friend Jang Go who had a crush on her initial boyfriend. It’s been ages since I saw her, the last thing must have been School 2017. I’ve also seen her in Moon Lovers: Scarlet Heart Ryeo (my heart still aches from that) and Ruby Ruby Love. I’ve missed her! The only thing I found a pity was that she never gave Jo Jo a chance to explain herself. Like, I get that she was mad at her, but Jo Jo really wanted to make amends with her, and she just completely shut her off while she (probably) knew she didn’t have anyone else. She could’ve given her a chance to make up for lying. I’m not saying it was good of Jo Jo to lie about it, but I just wished there had been a way for them to make up. They were really good friends before it all happened in the beginning and you could tell she meant a lot to Jo Jo. I hope to see more Z.Hera soon!

I didn’t think I knew Kim Shi Eun from anywhere although she did seem slightly familiar to me. Turns out she was in School 2017 and Room No. 9! In the latter she played the younger version of a minor character who appeared only briefly so I may not have made that connection, but at least I was right to think I’d seen her face before. She has a really cute smile! I was worried that she might become the spiteful new girlfriend who would confront Jo Jo with the fact that she needed to back off from Sun Oh because he was with her now, but she was none of that. She was really cool, as I mentioned before. She was definitely hurt by the fact that Sun Oh didn’t ring her Alarm, but she never saw it as a reason to give up. She wanted to make him ring it and was willing to put in all the necessary effort. There came a point where it seemed hopeless and she actually broke up with him and then left with another random guy who did ring her Alarm and I was like, ‘You’re just gonna go with the first best person now?’ but in the end hers still only rang for Sun Oh. And I was really glad that he chose to go after her, as well. In a way, Sun Oh also made his own choice there, he chose to ignore the Alarm that only rang for Jo Jo, he chose to put in effort to make it ring for Yook Jo. I’ve compared her to Hye Yeong before, because she was to Sun Oh what Hye Yeong was to Jo Jo. She was patient, she didn’t get mad, even though she was hurt or disappointed she kept smiling and she was over the moon when he started making effort as well. She accepted that he would need time to get over Jo Jo, it was clear to her that she’d meant a lot to him. She chose not to be the bitchy new girlfriend, she chose to be patient with him and respect his decisions and that made her a very mature character. I liked her!

And of course I’m always happy to see Kim Young Ok, the ultimate K-Drama grandmother, as Jo Jo’s grandmother. She didn’t even have a speaking role and only appeared in flashbacks or while she was barely conscious in the hospital, but it was clear how much she meant to Jo Jo. Everything Kim Young Ok does works for me, she’s such a precious lady.

Okay! So now for some concluding comments before finalizing my review. As I said, I was a bit worried that I might not like this series after hearing some disappointed comments and reviews about it. The ones that are on the top on MyDramaList are also very negative, but I was actually positively surprised. I guess I saw something in it that others didn’t, and the other way around.
I just think this series expresses so well how important it is to keep thinking and feeling for yourself and not to let other people OR things determine your feelings for you. Yes, it can be hard to figure out what it is you’re truly feeling, but we all have to deal with it. As I’ve said multiple times before in my reviews, I believe that feelings are uncontrollable. They just happen and they tell you how you feel whether you like it or not. Joalarm took away people’s own ability to do this, to feel what they feel without control, and to decide for themselves what they had to do in order to act on those naturally occurring feelings.
I’ve mentioned this before, but it really reminded me of Black Mirror, especially of episodes like Nosedive and Hang the DJ. First of all, because it’s about feeling validated. The people obsessed with hearts might be seen as an equivalent to people who are obsessed with getting likes on social media. If you don’t get any, you may get demotivated and insecure and you might start to feel that no one likes/loves you. Secondly, because love is regulated through a system, people aren’t even trying to listen to their own hearts/feelings anymore. They just follow the app’s guidelines because that’s what will tell them who they supposedly love and there’s no reason to look further once you ring someone’s Alarm.

In hindsight, I thought it was a pretty good series. It had a good and clear message, and I believe it’s also a warning to modern society as we are starting to be led by technology more and more. It might not always be a bad thing, but we have to keep in mind that our own feelings and thoughts are still the most important, and that we shouldn’t let those be determined by machines. I think Jo Jo was a very inspirational character in that she had to deal with a very real trauma and felt very alone and isolated in a world where all people cared about were hearts and appearances. No one was willing to look deeper than the surface/screen, no one was willing to look past the limited possibilities that the app gave. No one felt the need to make any additional effort because everything would be taken care of for them. Jo Jo had to figure out her life all by herself. She was lucky enough to find someone like Hye Yeong, who was also willing to lay down the technology and go about it the ‘old-fashioned’ way. I think it would not be easy to go against the system like that, to lead such a guided life with an app and then still be given the opportunity to make your own choice and really make it. Jo Jo was brave enough to choose her own. She was brave enough to direct her feelings to the person she wanted to direct them to, and to send them to Hye Yeong as one would a regular confession of love. If she hadn’t installed the Shield, she would’ve probably stuck with Sun Oh just because the app told her to, and she wouldn’t even have considered Hye Yeong as a possibility, no matter how much he would’ve tried to pursue her.

I’m glad I gave this series a fair chance despite my prior expectations, because it did surprise me in a good way. I can say now that I don’t fully agree with most of the negative responses, I actually understood where the main characters were coming from and I was able to find logic in their behavior. I think it’s really important to keep in mind in what kind of world they were living and how pressuring it was for some people, some people who were not able to enjoy the good aspects of the Joalarm app. It’s also important to consider Jo Jo’s trauma and how deeply rooted it was, and that it was a normal response for her to take a step back, because everyone around her treated her like a burden and she wasn’t used to being loved by anyone besides her grandmother ever since she lost her parents. I think there’s definitely a lot of logic to find in it. People may not agree with the fact she chose Hye Yeong over Sun Oh, but I only thought that was a refreshing decision to make. It just made sense to me and I was really proud of Jo Jo at the end, because she still managed to face her past and embrace it and no longer feel it as something weighting her down. The ending was just really satisfying to me, everything just fell into place and all the questions I had towards the end were answered. So for me, it was a good one!

I’m actually not entirely sure what I’ll watch next because besides my list I do have a growing urge to catch up on some more recently trending series that I can’t wait for to watch. So the next one will probably be a surprise for all of us, haha. At least now I finished my batch of trending K-Dramas from 2019, woohoo! xD

See you next time! Bye-bee! ^^

Disclaimer: this is a review, and as such it contains spoilers of the whole series. Please proceed to read at your own risk if you still plan on watching this show or if you haven’t finished it yet. You have been warned.

Drama Special: If We Were a Season
(우리가 계절이라면 / Uriga Gyejeoriramyeon)
MyDramaList rating: 6.5/10

Hello everyone! I took the opportunity of a national holiday to watch this drama special and write a review about it. I’ve watched a drama special before, and I find that they are often just as much worth watching as a multi-episode drama. They feel more like short movies and I just like to occasionally add them to my watch list as a kind of pallet cleanser in-between more lengthy dramas. Anyways, I guess this was on my watchlist since it had Chae Soo Bin in it, and I really like her as an actress especially in romance genres, and this looked cute. I wasn’t sure what it would be about, I just thought it was going to be a cute romance story between two childhood friends, but it went in a slightly different direction and that actually made it more realistic than a typical romance K-Drama (special) where you just know that the main leads will eventually end up falling for each other. I’ve read a lot of very emotional and praising comments online, but I have to admit from the start that when I just finished it, I was hella confused. It wasn’t until I took a shower and went over it a couple of times in my head that I came to the arguments of this review, so I hope this will be a useful contribution to the debate about this story.

If We Were a Season is the 1st episode from KBS Drama Special Season 8 (2017). It’s about two childhood friends, Eum Gi Seok (played by Jang Dong Yoon) and Yoon Hye Rim (played by Chae Soo Bin). They were born on the same day and have been next-door neighbors their entire lives, so they literally grew up side by side. Their bedroom windows face each other and they have this cute bell on a string that connects their rooms via this window. This system of pulling the bell on their side to make it go off in the other room to let them each other know they wanted to talk was established when they were kids but even when they grow older they keep it. During their teens, they start avoiding each other a bit, as friendships between a teenage boy and girl can get a little awkward, I guess, but then they reconnect when they end up in the same class in high school. They’re so comfortable with each other that they even seem like a married couple at times, and everyone just expects they’ve already kissed at least once. For Gi Seok, it’s pretty clear that he likes Hye Rim at this point. He even gets defensive when he sees her interact with other guys and it’s like he just assumes that they are basically already together, even though neither of them have ever spelled it out to the other. Hye Rim doesn’t act like a jealous girlfriend to Gi Seok per se, but she’s the most herself around him and it’s clear that she cares for him a lot as well.
But then, there’s a new student, a boy called Oh Dong Kyung (played by Jin Young) that transfers to their class. He immediately seems to be interested in Hye Rim, and Gi Seok really doesn’t like this. Hye Rim isn’t necessarily interested in Dong Kyung at first, but she also doesn’t avoid him (I mean why would she, he’s just a friendly classmate). Hye Rim and Dong Kyung meet a few times outside of school when Gi Seok isn’t there, and there is some kind of connection between them. After coincidentally meeting when Hye Rim is following her father and Dong Kyung is following his mother to see if they’re seeing each other in secret, they end up hanging out together for the day and they have quite a fun time. However, for some reason, while Dong Kyung is quite straightforward about his intentions, Hye Rim keeps trying to avoid saying how she feels out loud and she also realizes she feels weirdly guilty towards Gi Seok for not telling him about how she’s becoming closer with Dong Kyung. The more Hye Rim realizes that Gi Seok’s feelings for her are growing, the more uncertain she becomes about her own feelings. Is she really in love with Gi Seok or did she just get used to the comfortable relationship between them? Is she attracted to Dong Kyung or is she just caught off guard by him because he makes her heart flutter while she’s not considered anyone besides Gi Seok before? And then when she finds out that her dad really is seeing another woman, will she be able to deal with her feelings for either of these boys, all the while scared that their relationship might end up the same way?

The series deals with very realistic, confusing emotions and dynamics between people. I admit that I’ve read a few comments and reviews from other people before I wrote my own thoughts down, because I always find it interesting to see how everyone interprets a story’s message differently.
Personally, when I finished the special I was really confused about Hye Rim’s true feelings. To me it felt like she was clearly leaning towards Gi Seok from the beginning. Neither of them ever defined their relationship, but it felt like that wasn’t necessary, it was just there. But when she first meets Dong Kyung and then later finds out about her father’s affair, Hye Rim pushes Gi Seok away. The timing was pretty unfortunate, admittedly. Gi Seok asks her to meet him at the park one night, and that same night she finds out about her dad and also bumps into Dong Kyung and her feelings are probably all mixed up, especially because she already anticipates that Gi Seok is probably going to confess his feelings to her when she meets him at the park. She actually goes there to see him waiting for her, but decides to turn around and texts him that she can’t make it. The next day at school she suddenly ‘admits’ that she has had feelings for Dong Kyung from the start, but this didn’t feel like the truth to me. I mean, she rejected Dong Kyung before and there were no signs that she started dating him after she told Gi Seok this, so I was just confused about why she would lie about it. I also didn’t think it was right of her to keep Gi Seok, her best friend who also got her back in any kind of situation, who cared about her more than anyone, out of everything that was happening with her. I’m sure he would’ve been able to understand why she wanted able to give him an answer. It made complete sense why at that moment she had too many things going on and she wasn’t able to focus on whether she wanted to start a romantic relationship with Gi Seok after all those years. She was just confused and hadn’t figured out how she felt about everything yet. But I still think she shouldn’t have lied to him, because it also caused Gi Seok to become more petty and pouty. Since she wouldn’t say anything, he just assumed that she was rejecting him for Dong Kyung and that only made him more jealous. He eventually starts ignoring and avoiding her again, saying he can’t look at her face anymore, hurting her feelings in return, and then they got stuck in that vicious circle.

I wondered about a few things, including the title ‘If We Were a Season’, because I first interpreted it as the beginning of a question. Like ‘If we were a season, what would we be?’, and I couldn’t find an answer to it. Yes, the seasons are shown to pass by throughout the special and there’s one scene between Hye Rim and Dong Kyung where he says his birthday is in winter and Hye Rim’s is in spring. But other than that, there wasn’t actually any talk about seasons. I just thought that it was a thematic thing, that it showed Gi Seok and Hye Rim through the different seasons as their relationship changed.
However, after thinking it over, I came to a new theory. Maybe it’s not the beginning of a question to determine what seasons they would be, but that what happened to them is here symbolized as a season. So what I mean is that, like a season, any season, their relationship changed. In any season, the weather can suddenly turn around, the wind can turn and a sunny day can turn into a rainy one. Their relationship as pictured in this special had a lot of ups and downs, and they could be the most comfortable with each other one day, and avoiding each other’s gaze the next. So I thought that maybe it was just to illustrate that their relationship in itself was like a season, with all its unpredictable twists and turns.
As for Hye Rim’s feelings, I guess I can get behind the idea that she always just assumed that she was in love with Gi Seok and would end up with him since he was the only boy her age she felt so comfortable with. But then when Dong Kyung showed up and he made her heart flutter with his cheesy remarks and his straightforwardness – in contrast to Gi Seok, who also never spoke out his true feelings – she suddenly started to waver. Was she really in love with Gi Seok or was she just taking her feelings for him for granted? In the end, I feel like she didn’t have real feelings for either of the boys, or at least she just wasn’t there yet. Even if she did like Gi Seok, she needed more time to fully acknowledge that within herself, and the way it happened in the story just really didn’t come at a good time for her.
I have to say that, although I saw the thing that happened with her dad as something that was just really upsetting for her, something that she first needed to deal with before she could go on with her own (love) life, but I hadn’t interpreted it like other people as that she rejected Gi Seok because she immediately became afraid that they would end up like her parents. I hadn’t made that far connection and I’m not sure if I feel that way. I just thought that phrase her dad used, ‘I couldn’t help myself’, echoed within her, but I wasn’t sure how she interpreted it, exactly. I first thought that it was going to be the other way around, that she was going to tell Dong Kyung that she tried, but couldn’t help being more attracted to Gi Seok, but then it suddenly looked like it was going the opposite way. Suddenly it was like she wanted to tell Gi Seok that she really tried having these feelings for him but realized Dong Kyung made her heart flutter more. In any case, I saw a lot of comments saying that this phrase resonated with her because she immediately became afraid that the incident with her dad cheating on her mom would also happen to her. That that was her biggest fear at that point. But I personally feel like that’s a bit farfetched. I mean, it’s not like she was considering his marriage proposal, they were still only thinking about dating. She shouldn’t have to get so scared already about him cheating on her in the future. So I personally wouldn’t go for that theory. I personally think the phrase ‘I tried to stop myself but I couldn’t help myself’ just added to her confusion about her feelings for both Gi Seok and Dong Kyung. She wasn’t sure what she truly felt about either of them anymore, and the upsetting situation of discovering her dad’s affair just came along at that same sucky time. But I was also thinking that the phrase resonated with her specifically because she did feel something for Dong Kyung, it may not have been strong enough to immediately make her fall for him, but he did awaken something in her that she’d never had before. He was very straightforward about his feelings, while she and Gi Seok never used to talk about their feelings. So I guess she wanted to be honest and tell Gi Seok that she couldn’t lie about that she did feel something with Dong Kyung, but the way she did it was just… I mean, she didn’t have to use the exact phrase that her father used there, because she really made it sound like she was choosing Dong Kyung, even though she wasn’t choosing either of them. So I didn’t really understand why she would give this explanation to Gi Seok, she knew it was going to break his heart and she could’ve just as well been honest with him, that she wasn’t sure how she was feeling and that her family situation was a mess. But instead she pushed Gi Seok away quite harshly, and it did feel like a bit of low blow to me.
Especially because when he starts avoiding her afterwards, we see how much it effects her. She misses him a lot, she really cares about him. And then I thought, maybe she was just trying to preserve their friendship. She didn’t want to make a hasty decision to become his girlfriend when there’s a chance their bond may be ruined in the future and they can’t go back to being such close friends as they used to. Maybe that’s why she didn’t want to risk it in that moment, which is fair. But I still feel like she didn’t handle it that well.

It also ties together with something that Gi Seok tells her later. Hye Rim is initially busy studying and preparing herself for a couple of things like basketball and entering a college of education. Gi Seok already tells her in the beginning that being a teacher is not her call, but she keeps doing her thing.
After the whole emotional rejection went down, they talk one more time through their windows and Gi Seok tells her that he knows that she can’t keep on doing stuff she doesn’t truly love. That she might be able to keep it up for a few years, but won’t be able to keep doing it for the rest of her life.
When we fastforward to a few years later, Hye Rim is moving to Seoul (I’m not sure where they were living in the beginning but it wasn’t the big city), and Gi Seok unexpectedly turns up at the train platform to bid her farewell. There Hye Rim tells him that she indeed gave up on basketball and the college of education because it wasn’t for her, like he said.
But then I started thinking, what if this also applied to her feelings towards Gi Seok? What if she had been dismissing the fact that it might not be what she actually wanted? What if she just went along with it because it was comfortable, and then realized she wasn’t a 100% sure about it after all when she got into that situation? Maybe him telling her that was what she needed to gain more clarity about her own feelings as well, about her future but also about her feelings.

I liked the ending because it was quite open. In the beginning of the story, Gi Seok is actually trying to come up with a strategy to kiss Hye Rim since his friends had put ‘having a passionate kiss’ on his year assessment form as a joke, not aware that it couldn’t be changed. But then while watching a movie together, Hye Rim says that she prefers a movie or story to end with a tight hug rather than a kiss. A kiss is always so final, while a tight hug is just as warm and comfortable and it allows for a more open ending, as if the story isn’t over yet.
So when Gi Seok comes to bid her farewell when she leaves for Seoul, he gives her the ending she wanted. He gives her a tight hug. I read that many people interpreted this accordingly, that their story wasn’t over, that it wasn’t a definite ending of their relationship yet. Maybe it really is about Hye Rim needing more time to figure herself out more before being ready to accept his feelings. And that’s completely fair, of course.

So yeah, while one might say this drama special doesn’t give the viewer the closure that they want – funny how closure in K-Drama usually has to do with two people ending up together, isn’t it? – I do think that it was a very realistic depiction of human emotions and relationships. I was vaguely reminded of Valid Love, in which the female lead had just gone along with her first love and married him before ever experiencing any other type of relationship and then gets swept off her feet by a new attractive stranger. Of course, this would be the high school version of that, it wasn’t yet about marrying, it was just young love, but it already got quite emotional. I really think that Hye Rim did love Gi Seok, but that the timing just wasn’t right and that she got confused when she got flustered by another guy, which is also normal. I’ve mentioned this before, I believe also in my review of Valid Love, but we can’t help our emotions, they do as they please. Even Hye Rim’s father proved this, he literally says that he tried to stop himself, but when she told him there was something she really wanted, he just found himself wanting to give it to her.
Of course our feelings can get in the way of situations, and they can get in the way of other people’s feelings, especially when they’re not reciprocated, but principally we can’t do anything about that. It’s not good to force ourselves to feel a certain way when we don’t, to keep pursuing something we’re actually not passionate about. And you can’t keep always considering other people, sometimes you just have to choose for yourself first, get your own facts straight before continuing your relationship with another person. In hindsight I think that this might have been a message of this drama as well, and that’s what made it very realistic. It set itself apart from regular romantic comedy genres because first and foremost, the girl doesn’t pick a guy in the end, she chooses to focus on herself first, no matter how sad it makes her to not be able to respond to her best friend’s feelings right away. But at least Gi Seok understood in the end, he apologized for his behavior and the tight hug may just as well mean they’ll get together in the future, when they’re both ready.

Let me just finish off with some cast comments.

Chae Soo Bin is such a doll, I really love her and I love that she’s now become a lead actress rather than the side character or second female lead. I’ve seen her in Sassy Go Go, Moonlight Drawn By Clouds, Shopping King Louie, I’m Not a Robot and in the movie Sweet & Sour. She just has this sweetness about her, and I can barely remember how in Sassy Go Go she actually played the ‘bitchy’ character. I wish she would get more characters to express her versatility in though, because I do feel like she’s typecasted as the bubbly girl more and more often, which suits her, of course, and I always enjoy her performances. I really want to see more of her acting in the future, and I’m sure I will.

I’ve only seen Jang Dong Yoon in School 2017 so far, but a few of his dramas are still on my watchlist. I think he acted really well in this series. I remember him being quite timid in School 2017, but here he showed a wide variety of expressions, and I could see that he is a pretty good actor. I liked that his character showed clear growth, he portrayed Gi Seok very well, it was nice to see his young pettiness grow into maturity. I am curious to see more of him!

I had to do my best to not just type ‘Jin Young’ instead of Dong Kyung the entire time I was writing this review, because even when I was watching it, he was just Jin Young to me, haha. It’s weird because I’ve only seen him in Moonlight Drawn By Clouds and My First First Love, but it feels like I know him from much more. Maybe it’s because of variety shows or something, I don’t know. Anyways, I love him. I liked how fresh his character Dong Kyung was, he was really down to earth and straightforward about his feelings, creating the perfect contrast with Gi Seok. I wish his character had gotten more closure though, now I just felt bad for him that he was rejected. I do wonder though, who it was that Hye Rim was talking to on the phone saying that they’d see each other in Seoul. When Dong Kyung transferred they said he’d come from Seoul, so a part of me wondered if they did end up together, but it was never indicated. Anyways, I liked his character mostly because I feel like he was the trigger that finally tested the relationship between Gi Seok and Hye Rim and that’s what they needed to take their relationship to the next level.

Of course since it was only one episode, the cast wasn’t very extended.
There was Jung In Ki (Secret Garden, Flower Boy Ramyun Shop, Doctor Stranger, Pinocchio, The Girl Who Sees Smells, Who Are you – School 2015, Weightlifting Fairy Kim Bok Joo, Bride of the Water God, Manhole, Come and Hug Me, My Absolute Boyfriend) as Hye Rim’s father, and I will always love this actor because he’s always the sweet father, even though he allegedly cheated on his wife in this story. Nam Ki Ae (Oh My Venus, Descendants of the Sun, Another Oh Hae Young, W, My Secret Romance, Suspicious Partner, Just Between Lovers, Encounter) was Hye Rim’s mother, a piano major who had her own piano studio and sometimes wasn’t home for longer periods of time. She’s an actress that’s typically always gets cast as one of the main characters’ mom, but she’s played pretty snooty moms as well. Here she seemed like a really nice mom, although she may not have been home a lot.
We actually don’t see Gi Seok’s parents at all, but there were his two school friends Seo Min Joon (Ahn Seung Gyun – School 2017, Andante, My Mister, Thirty but Seventeen and Gyeryong Fairytale) and Lee Jung Ho (Kim Min Gyu – Oh My Venus, Gogh The Starry Night, Fight For My Way, I’m Not a Robot, Gyeryong Fairytale and Clean With Passion For Now). It was funny seeing the latter as a high school student, especially since the last time I saw him in Gyeryong Fairytale I was really wondering how old he might be, lol.

As I conclude, I’ll just say that I liked how this drama special played with human emotions, and how they can sometimes mislead or confuse you. What’s also fun is that it starts off mostly with the perspective from Gi Seok’s side and then really subtly changes over to Hye Rim’s side. They played with perspective and dynamic and even though the episode ends with that one hug, I really hope that beyond this realm, Gi Seok and Hye Rim find each other again and that they’ll both be ready to make the next step in their relationship. Or not, if that’s not what they want anymore, of course. The most important thing to remember is that, like the seasons, human emotions and feelings, and even relationships, can be very whimsical and inexplicable at times, and we have to roll with the punches of those seasons, metaphorically or not, our entire lives.

It was nice watching a simple and light drama special before I move on to the next Netflix K-Drama that has been pending, I’m finally finishing my 2019 Netflix K-Drama batch and I’m really excited about the next one, all the more because I’ve heard very varying reactions to it. I wonder how I will feel about it!
You will hear from me again next month, probably. Bye-bee! ^^

Disclaimer: this is a review, and as such it contains spoilers of the whole series. Please proceed to read at your own risk if you still plan on watching this show or if you haven’t finished it yet. You have been warned.

Arthdal Chronicles Season 1
(아스달 연대기/Aseudal Yeondaegi)
MyDramaList rating: 7.0/10

Hi everyone! Back with a new review! With spring setting in and some changes in my personal and work life, it’s been a bit of a rollercoaster the past few weeks, but I’m glad I got to finish this one before the month ended. Luckily from next month on, I’ll get an extra day off so I’ll get to rest more and find more time and energy to invest in my love of watching all the dramas still on my list. Anyways! I finally got to watch this! I knew in advance that there will be a second season of this – I actually thought it was already out but apparently it got postponed due to the pandemic (as did so many projects). I was really curious about this series since I’ve never watched a fantasy K-Drama like this before, and I was really interested in how they would pull this off and what kind of tone this fantasy story would be set in. I was also really curious to see Song Joong Ki and Kim Ji Won acting in a drama genre I’ve never seen them in before. In hindsight, I would say that it reminded me mostly of Game of Thrones, without the sex. I’m still not 100% sure how I feel about it, but it definitely was something and it definitely made an impression on me. It’s going to be very complicated to write a review about this since there’s so much to this drama and it’s definitely not just one simple linear story, but I’ll do my best!

Arthdal Chronicles is a Netflix K-Drama of 18 episodes, with episodes of 1 hour and 20 minutes. It’s officially divided in 3 parts of 6 episodes, but I only found out about that after I’d finished it, so I wasn’t aware of that and watched it as a whole. But officially it’s divided in Part 1: The Children of the Prophecy, Part 2: The Sky Turning Inside Out, Rising Land, and Part 3: The Prelude to All Legends. It’s set in the fictional world of Arth, where there are many different lands with many different clans, with many different tribes, who worship many different gods.
In general, there are three kinds of people. The first kind is the Saram (incidentally the Korean word for ‘people’), and these are the ‘normal’ human beings with no special powers, and with red blood.
Then there’s the Neanthals, who are more feral, you could say. They have darker skin, blue eyes, lips and blood, and they possess more developed skills than the Saram. For example, they are stronger, faster, and their special eyes allow them to see clearly in the dark. The Neanthals have almost entirely been wiped out by the Saram by the time the story starts.
Thirdly, there’s the Igutus, and these are people born from one Saram and one Neanthal parent, so you could say they are like half-breeds. They carry a blue Neanthal scab on their back that eventually falls off and they have purple lips and purple blood. They also have some more powers than Saram, but not as apparent as the Neanthals. They also don’t look that distinctively different from the Saram except for their purple lips.
In developed Saram civilizations such as the Union of Arthdal, the capital city of Arth, where the majority of this series takes place, Igutus and Neanthals are seen as unnatural, beasts, monsters, whatever you want to call it. They are not welcome, in any case, and avoided as much as possible.

The series follows different characters from different parts of Arth, whose stories all get entwined with each other. What causes their fates to get entwined is the war that the Saram declare on the Neanthals.
It all started when Arthdal’s Union Leader, San Woong (played by Kim Eui Sung), attempts to strike a deal with the Neanthals, to join hands and start a nation together. Of course, this is mostly a strategy of the Saram to get their hands on The Plains of the Moon, the lands that the Neanthals officially own. The Neanthals refuse the offer, and while San Woong then spreads the word that they will send them another gift in order to persuade them, they actually start preparing a war against them.
A woman of the Asa Clan, one of Arthdal’s main clans, Asa Hon (played by Choo Ja Hyun) who is with San Woong on his mission because she can interpret for the Neanthals, is led to believe the gift story, and she is sent out to deliver fabrics and materials to the Neanthals, not aware that these fabrics are wrapped around remains of animals that died of an infectuous disease. Against Asa Hon’s knowing, this disease spreads throughout the Neanthals and on a night they all gather to celebrate the crescent moon, San Woong and his soldiers exterminate them all with fire arrows. They have nowhere to escape. The whole plan is set up by San Woong’s son Tagon (as a teenager played by Jung Jae Won), who will proceed to become the well-respected war hero of Arthdal.
Asa Hon, realizing her own tribe and union leaders have used her as a pawn to set this plan against the Neanthals in motion, decides to break ties with the Saram. She stays to take care of some Neanthal children that have lost their parents, and she even falls in love with a surviving Neanthal warrior and has two Igutu babies from him.
After the war, The Great Hunt begins, in which San Woong’s warriors’ unit, the Daekan Forces, hunt down the remaining Neanthals that managed to survive the attack and the disease. They manage to also kill the father of Asa Hon’s babies. Tagon finds one of the babies that was left in the bushes and takes it with him in secret, aware that it’s an Igutu.
Asa Hon flees with her remaining baby to Iark, a land where allegedly the gods of Arthdal can’t follow her.
The thing is, Asa Hon has dreams. Having dreams is not something that normal people can do in this world, it’s something that only people with special training or ancestry can have, and dreams seen as either hallucinations or prophetical visions. For some reason, Asa Hon has a dream about one of Arthdal’s gods, Aramun Haesulla, who appears to her in the form of a child. He tells her that her baby is cursed, that it will bring great calamity to the world, and that she has to give him her child. She refuses, and he threatens to take her life when they next meet, either that or the baby’s brother or father. Asa Hon believes that her Neanthal man’s life was taken because she didn’t give her child to the god, and decides to flee to Iark, far away, because there, allegedly, the curses of Arthdal’s gods won’t be able to reach.
It’s a long journey, and Asa Hon gets weaker and more sickly every year while her child grows up. When the child is ten years old, he manages to find a way down the Great Black Cliff so they can finally enter Iark, but when they manage to finally get there, the weakened Asa Hon collapses. When they’re found by a group of innate villagers, the Wahan tribe, in her final hallucination she suddenly sees the child from her dream in her own son and starts calling the boy out for being Aramun Haesulla and leading her to Iark on purpose. She tells him to go back once his blue scab falls off, and passes away shortly afterwards. Her child, Eun Seom, is then taken in by the Wahan tribe.
Ten years pass and in the meantime, Tagon (now played by Jang Dong Geon) is respected by the entire Daekan Forces as their leader. He has been out fighting for ten years as his father keeps finding ways to get him away from Arthdal. The baby that he took that day during the Great Hunt has been raised in secret, the only other person who knows about him is his lover Hae Taealha (played by Kim Ok Bin). She has helped him raise the Igutu boy. Her faithful servant Hae Tuak (played by Yoon Sa Bong) also knows about the boy, but not that he’s an Igutu, that fact is kept strictly secret between Tagon and Taealha.
Tagon suddenly receives a new order from his father to go to Iark, since they have finally found a way to descend the Great Black Cliff, and enslave a bunch of ‘barbarians’ living there because they need more workers. So Tagon orders his soldiers to do so. The ‘barbarians’ that become the victims here are, unfortunately, the Wahan tribe people.
In ten years time, Eun Seom (now played by Song Joong Ki) has become a member of the Wahan, although he can’t escape the fact that he wasn’t born as one. He also seems to be able to dream, and the others just find him a bit strange in general. The only person who accepts him for who he is, is Tanya (played by Kim Ji Won), a girl who’s next in line to become the clan’s Great Mother. However, Tanya is not able to dream or even memorize the Spirit Dance as she’s supposed to, so she struggles with her given fate. On the day of their festival, the Daekan Forces burst in and start destroying their village, slaughtering half of the people, including children, and they take the rest with them to the huge installation that has now been built on the Great Black Cliff to bring them up. Eun Seom goes in pursuit, determined to free his family, but this is not an easy thing to do. The brutal Daekan soldiers are not shy to keep killing the Wahan people along the way, and even though Eun Seom comes close several times, he and Tanya are still not able to meet. Tanya is able to keep the soldiers at bay with her talks of how she is the next Great Mother, and that she can put spells on people.
The final group ends up at Arthdal’s Fortress of Fire, and in an attempt to escape from there, Tanya accidentally stumbles upon Saya, the boy who was raised in secret by Tagon. To her immense surprise, he is the spitting image of Eun Seom, and she realizes very quickly that they must be twins. In Saya’s room there are many things that Eun Seom has described to her, things that he saw in his dreams. So we understand here, Eun Seom and Saya were separated as babies, but they are connected through their dreams. Since they don’t know of each other’s existence, they just interpret these visions as dreams, not aware that they are actually seeing things through each other’s eyes. Tanya is busted by Tagon, but instead of killing her (as he kills every single person that discovers Saya and/or that he’s an Igutu), he gives her to Taealha to raise as a servant. Tanya is a tough cookie though, and uses the things that Eun Seom has told her from his dreams to scare Taealha with stories she couldn’t possibly know about. For example, how Taealha once killed a servant girl Saya fell in love with and was planning to escape with. Despite her own worries, Tanya finally becomes able to dream and even hear other people’s thoughts, and she manages to climb her way up to being declared the new leader of the Asa clan – all the while following her own plan to attain ‘power’ as that is the only way to ever be reunited with Eun Seom again. Matters on Tanya’s side get a bit complicated when Saya starts developing feelings for her while also becoming more and more aware that people (who have seen Eun Seom before) start looking at him with a strange expression of recognition. In the meantime, Eun Seom starts uniting different tribes outside of Arthdal to follow his lead to eventually take revenge on Tagon.
While multiple parties, including Taealha’s father Hae Mihol (played by Jo Sung Ha) and the High Priest and Asa Clan leader Asa Ron (played by Lee Do Kyung), start plotting against Tagon’s ascension after his father dies, Tagon starts succumbing more and more to his greed of wanting to own all of Arthdal, starting with becoming the new Union Leader, being declared as the second coming of Aramun Haesulla, and then aiming to become King.

Honestly, I had a hard time getting into it in the beginning. For some reason I just couldn’t get myself to fully pay attention to all the events in the first half of the series and I just had it on in the background while I was doing something else at the same time. I think part of it had to do with the fact that, from the first minute on, you are immersed in the story before you even know what’s going on and who is who. The pace is quite fast, even in the introductory part in the first episode, and there’s immediately a lot of character and place names thrown at you. Only when I rewatched the first episode after finishing the whole series, did I fully understand what had happened between the Neanthals and the Saram and how the babies were separated etcetera. If you want to watch this series and really follow it from beginning to end, you REALLY need to pay attention to EVERY detail. Because as it happens, there’s also a lot of subtle foreshadowing in it that I just completely missed when I watched it the first time. In this sense too, it reminded me of Game of Thrones. Right off the bat you’re introduced to all these different characters from different lands and clans/tribes in Arth that all deal with their own issues, their own gods and rebellions. At some point, all the storylines will cross each other, but it takes some time to build up before that happens, and for me this took quite a long time. It wasn’t until I rewatched the first episode that I realized they were already talking about the Ago Tribe, for example, even though the Ago Tribe appears only in the final episodes and by then I didn’t even remember them being mentioned before. There are just SO many things going on.
I think it’s very fitting to call this a Chronicle series. The main story may be centered about these four main characters, but as a whole it’s about the entire fate of Arth, all its people and civilizations. In every place in this world, events are unfolding simultaneously, and I do think the writers managed to establish the links between the stories very well, even though it took someone like me a bit longer to understand all those links. And honestly, it succeeded in making that build-up up to the season finale, because I have to admit that even though I didn’t feel like I was very invested in it halfway through, and that might not even watch the second season, the way it ended just made me feel like I HAD to watch how it continues. Truly, they were very good with cliffhangers and the season finale was a perfect season finale moment. I really feel like I need to know what happens next!

Undoubtedly because of my lack of attention in the first half, I feel like I missed a lot of the initial plots being made against Tagon between figures like Mihol and Asa Ron. Since I found it a bit hard to follow in the beginning I really think I would have to rewatch the whole thing and pay really close attention to everything that’s being said to make better sense of it and not miss anything. The only thing I was aware of was that Mihol and Asa Ron kept changing strategies, then pretending to work together, then when Tagon busted them they pretended to be on his side again, while they were actually very keen on seeing him fall. Due to my lack of emotional investment at this point I couldn’t really understand what their actual motives were for this, although I can imagine that they just wanted to maintain the power they personally had and not give it away to Tagon. From Mihol’s side, since his clan used to be independent and was taken over by Tagon’s, I could understand that he had a lingering resentment against him. But the Asa Clan had been beside Tagon’s clan for years, even before the war, so I wasn’t entirely sure what Asa Ron’s deal was. I just found him a stubborn old man most of the time, so I wasn’t very invested in his story anyways. But yeah, there was definitely an ongoing game of ‘let’s try to bring Tagon down’ from multiple sides, including Tagon’s own father San Woong.
I don’t know if I can bring up the time and energy to rewatch this show, since it’s quite lengthy. But who knows, maybe when the second season comes out I’ll be able to focus on it better from the start.

Let me talk about the main characters in more detail, starting with Tagon.
Great almighty Tagon from the Saenyeok Tribe. The war hero and respected son of the Union Leader who the people of Arthdal all adore and admire so much. There’s no way he would be capable of killing his own father or showing cruelty to innocent people, right? If only it was that simple.
I’ve never seen a main character in a drama that left me with so many questions. I just couldn’t figure Tagon out. I just kept believing that he was a genuinely good person deep inside, that he was just a tragic hero figure that had been traumatized by his father. To be honest, he kept reminding me of Thorin Oakenshield from The Hobbit, with his constant melancholic expression and this vibe of being burdened by the power laid upon him. I did find him a bit mysterious as a teenager in the flashback though, the way he responded to finding that Igutu baby in the woods, how he just killed those two soldiers who witnessed it without batting an eyelid and what drove him to taking the baby with him. Why did he go through the trouble of raising it, even though he kept him locked away in a tower for all those years. As a teenager, he didn’t seem to be so troubled, he seemed to be friendly enough, so why did this trait suddenly appear? The reason, of course, has to do with one of the biggest plot twists of the series: Tagon is an Igutu himself. We don’t learn anything about his mother, he’s never known her and of course San Woong will take that secret with him to the grave. We only know that there has been a prophecy stating that Tagon will one day overpower his father, and this has made San Woong worried enough to keep sending him away on missions. But it’s not until we see Tagon’s flashbacks from when he was a child later in the series, that we see the full amount of his trauma. San Woong actually tried to kill Tagon when he was younger. He tried to ditch him in the forest and then when he still got out, he attempted to strangle him, although he couldn’t see it through. He does end up drilling it into his son’s head that he needs to kill every single person that sees his purple blood. And so it has become an automatic response to Tagon. Part of me kept feeling like he was just a victim of his upbringing, that there was still some good in him, because I really wanted to believe that. But then when he went on a rampage and all hell broke loose at the end, from that point onwards I felt like that final good part of him was lost. He kept saying that he didn’t like killing people, that he didn’t want it to come to that, but he still went on and did it. And at the end it just looked like he’d become completely numb to it all and didn’t care about it anymore as long as he could become King and have it all. So yeah, it was hard for me to sympathize much with his character, he was definitely very complicated and layered.
The same went for Taealha, actually. Taealha of the Hae Tribe, daughter of Hae Mihol, who is in charge of the Fortress of Fire and the only person who knows the secret of how to make bronze in all of Arthdal. She has been Tagon’s friend and lover ever since they were teenagers, they both loathed their fathers and bonded over that, apparently. In the beginning of the series, at the behest of her father who’s using her as a spy, she is seeing Tagon as well as San Woong. However, one night when she’s supposed to poison Tagon, she ends up revealing her father’s plan to him instead and this is the moment she decides she loves Tagon too deeply to keep the charade up. They remain a loyal and loving team for a large part of the series and they clearly care about each other deeply, but at the same time, there still isn’t a 100% trust. They still know the other is capable of betrayal, they know each other too well.
Taealha first agrees to the plan of making Tagon King because she’s willing to share power with him, but then when Tagon (with the cunning help of Saya) decides that in order to become King, he will need to know the secret of the bronze himself and Mihol is captured and tortured to spit it out, Taealha ends up helping her father take poison so that he won’t have to disclose the secret, entrusting it only to her. In this, she does betray Tagon and she only manages to keep herself safe by telling Tagon she’s pregnant with his baby. She won’t tell him the secret, but he also won’t be able to get it out of her through physical intimidation.
Their relationship was so confusing because of their weird trust system. You could see how much they loved each other and wanted to be together, even after Taealha betrayed him Tagon still told her he wanted to keep her and the baby by his side. It seemed to me as if the complicated political situation and their respective greed for obtaining power beyond Arthdal got in their way rather than that it united them. In the end, it was as if Taealha only agreed to marry Tagon because it would be a step closer to achieving her personal goal of gaining power, because now she didn’t want to share it with Tagon anymore. She is so unshaken about her intentions in the beginning, but I think that her father’s death changes her mind and that’s what makes her decide to honor him in succeeding his work for the Hae Tribe rather than just living happily ever after as Tagon’s bride. So yeah, Taealha was also a very complicated character, but having two main characters that were so hard to figure out also made it interesting in a way. You just never knew what they were going to do, they kept making unexpected choices and that really kept me on my toes.

Saya holds a whole different story in itself, as well. Of course we don’t know exactly how he was raised, because we only see a baby being taken by Tagon in the flashback, and then the next time we see him, he’s already an adult. When Tanya finds him in that room, at first it seems like he’s very timid, but after finishing it I would really not use that word to describe him. It doesn’t take long for him to show his true colors, and when he does, it becomes clear that he finds certain entertainment in messing with people’s plans and I would say that he definitely harbored some vengefulness and even a little bloodlust. For example, it turns out that he never forgave Taealha for having the girl he loved killed, even though he’s acted very meak in the years following it, pretending to be like a whipped dog. He overhears Taealha talk about how Asa Ron needs to die so Tagon won’t be forced to marry a member of the Asa Clan and how Tagon’s half-brother Danbyeok needs to live to put some other plans in motion. Saya then proceeds to sneakily switch the poisons so that Danbyeok dies and Asa Ron stays alive. He really just does that because he wants to interfere with Taealha’s plans, out of revenge, not even aware of what these plans were linked to. After that, when he’s let out of his tower and gets more responsibilities in Arthdal, he seems to really enjoy seeing Tagon (his ‘father’) develop into the cruel King he becomes. There is something wicked about Saya, that’s for sure. It hasn’t come out yet, but I feel like that will definitely happen in the second season. After all, he finally finds out about his Igutu twin brother in the final episode. The way he looked at Tanya, realizing that she’d had Eun Seom in her heart all this time and not him, was really hurtful and honestly, I’m a bit scared of what he will do next.

If the above characters are complicated, Eun Seom is definitely a breath of fresh air. There’s nothing dual about him, he is the good and just simple hero who wants nothing but to free all the slaves and have peace for everyone. Even though he has threatened to take revenge on people by killing them, even kidnapping San Woong to get the Union to free the Wahan people, he can never go through with it. Rather, this latter incident only causes him to become a fugitive because he gets accused of murdering San Woong, even though this is actually Tagon’s doing, but of course no one believes he could do such a thing. Eun Seom gets captured multiple times, but is always able to escape at some point, and throughout his rocky journey he keeps meeting people that get touched by his kindness and belief in equality. I think the great thing about Eun Seom is that he is in fact not a hero. Despite his few advantages as an Igutu, he isn’t physically strong or anything like that, and he also says this at some point. He still gets captured, he still gets treated like a slave, but the important thing is that he always finds a way out by being smart rather than strong. The ability to copy movements after seeing them once is definitely an advantage, especially when it comes to ways to defend himself, but he prefers not to get too violent if it’s not necessary. At the end of the first season he manages to unite the entire Ago Tribe by convincing them that he is the second coming of one of their gods, Inaishingi, because he survived their Judgment Ceremony (they threw him off a waterfall). Of course he never would’ve survived this, but luckily he had friends/allies who were looking for him, and they managed to save him. Every trail he leaves, either a visual trail or a mark on someone’s heart, comes back and rewards him in the end.

Something that really started jumping out to me as I continued watching with more interest, was the contrasts between Tagon and Eun Seom, and also the contrast in the situations between Arthdal and the places Eun Seom visited. I will say a bit more about this later, but for one I thought that the final shot of the last episode was a very powerful image. On the one hand we see Tagon, who just got crowned King and is already declaring war on the Ago Tribe, and on the other hand we see Eun Seom being euphorically tilted on the shoulders of the Ago Tribe people, their faces full of joy and hope for a better world. These two are definitely having an epic face-off in the second season.

Tanya is introduced to a world she would never even dare to dream about. She is very lucky to have escaped her fellow tribe people’s fates, and that she even makes it as far as the new head of the Asa Clan despite being a ‘barbarian’ from Wahan. We can see her getting more and more anxious in her situation, because even though she now has a certain power, she still cannot control the people like Tagon does, and when he keeps displaying behavior that goes against her morals, she becomes more and more concerned. She sees how her fellow tribe people are getting used to the life in Arthdal, her father is even working at the Fortress of Fire, studying about metals and materials. You can see that she longs back for their life in Iark, but she’s slowly losing the people she left with, leaving her just hoping to one day see Eun Seom again so they can figure something out together. In Tanya’s case, it’s just really obvious that she is driven into a corner. She wants to gain more power, but she doesn’t have a clear view of what power actually entails yet. Her intentions are still too kind and not as effective as Tagon’s, who will just push his way through with his army. I do think her plan of gradually getting all the lower-rank people, the poor and the oppressed on her side shows promise, because it’s also basically what Eun Seom is trying to do. He picked up somewhere that having power means having a lot of people follow you, so that’s what he’s focussing on: gathering people to follow him. In Tanya’s case though, I’m not sure if it will have an immediate effect. The scene in the final episode where she stands up for those enslaved children, where she gives them shoes and food and tells them they can be anything they want is really touching, though. I actually cried a little there.

As I mentioned briefly before, I couldn’t help but pick up on certain contrasts in this series, contrasts between its people and their way of living, and between the social/political situations in different places. In the beginning, you would think that Arthdal is THE place to be, it has the Union Leader’s equivalent to a palace, the market place, it’s the big city where wealth flows and the people all seem to be happy and safe and devoted to their gods. But then when you look at the politics and how events unfold, how many innocent people are physically punished for just being related to someone who ‘committed a crime’, and how normalized that’s become, it’s a really messed up place. The people don’t even bother thinking for themselves, they just need a leader to follow. Even if they don’t agree with that leader, they don’t rebel against them, they just keep silent.
On the other hand, the ‘barbarians’, as the Wahans are called, the people who supposedly have nothing to live for, they were living in such peace and harmony before the Daekan Forces came to destroy that. They didn’t have anything but they didn’t need anything. They lived in oblivion of all the cruelty in the world, they didn’t even know what the word ‘power’ meant, heck, they didn’t even have chairs to sit on but they were the happiest people. Happy in their freedom, in their nature, in their own primitive way of living and serving their own gods. If you ask me, life in Iark was a hundred times better than life in Arthdal.
Speaking of this world of Arth, I found some interesting theories. On some sites, the summary of this series just says that it takes place in the bronze age of a fictional world, but for example on DramaCool, it said that Arthdal is the fictional capital of ancient Joseon, and it calls the Wahan ‘Han Chinese’. I don’t know if this is just a bad translation or if there’s any truth to it, but I highly doubt that any of this is related to an actual historical period like Joseon. Arth probably refers to Earth, yes. And maybe the different tribes are based off of different ethnicities, and the different lands symbolize our continents, that’s possible. That’s also the case in Game of Thrones, after all, that just makes it historical fantasy. As far as I know it doesn’t really parallel any real ethnicities. It’s interesting to search for parallels, though. I’m not saying that I’m dismissing that the displayed discrimination against the Neanthals and Igutus and other tribes echoes messages of racism and xenophobia, it deals with real social and political issues that are still meaningful today. Every clan, every tribe has their own typical appearances, they have lighter or darker skin, their garments are different depending on where they live. The Ago Tribe clans differ a lot from each other in attire, even though they belong to the same Tribe. The clans in Arthdal all have different ambitions and intentions even though they’re all Saram. In the time period that this story takes place, ancient times, things like Tribe names and attires still matter more than the fact that they’re actually all humans.
When Eun Seom is still a child, Asa Hon tells him, ‘Whether you’re a Saram or not isn’t determined by the color of your blood. If you live among the Saram then that makes you one.’ And this proves to be true, because Eun Seom is raised by Saram as a Saram. He doesn’t even know what an Igutu is, let alone that he is one, he only discovers that when he approaches Arthdal. And even after he finds out that he is an Igutu, to him it makes no difference. He doesn’t start acting differently when he finds out about his roots. There’s a moment when he actually meets two wandering Neanthals in the woods, and because he’s only ever heard about them, instead of just jumping on other people’s prejudiced fears, he is curious about them. He makes his own judgements and he really just judges someone as he meets them and gets to know them better.
I really hope these two Neanthals will return in the second season as well, by the way. The reveal that one of them was actually one of the children from the flashback, one of the Neanthal children that Asa Hon saved in the past! And that he even recognized Eun Seom even though he’d only seen him as a wee baby! I loved that. I’m glad they survived and I hope they’ll be back. It would make sense in more than one way, because they also have that link with Noon Byul.

Which brings me to my next paragraph, in which I want to share some opinions about side stories and side characters that I found interesting.
First of all, Chae Eun and her family. Eun Seom first meets Chae Eun (played by Go Bo Kyul) when he approaches Arthdal, she helps him escape after he’s ambushed by a farmer and accidentally kills him. Here he’s still travelling with Doti (Go Na Hee), the only Wahan child who managed to survive the village attack. Chae Eun is actually the person who tells him a bit about the Neanthals and that he’s an Igutu. I found her a bit mysterious in the beginning, also because she didn’t seem to be like the other Saram; she immediately makes it clear that she is not scared by the fact that he is an Igutu, and even though she’s only heard stories about the Neanthals, she says that there were supposedly much more beautiful than Saram.
They meet again when Eun Seom arrives in Arthdal, and it turns out she lives there with her parents and younger sister. She then helps Eun Seom hide his identity (aka his purple lips) and gives him and Doti a place to stay. Doti stays with this family when Eun Seom is forced to flee after San Woong’s death.
Chae Eun is the oldest daughter of Arthdal’s best doctor, Ha Rim (played by Jo Seung Yeon) who also even treats Tagon’s wounds when necessary. Her father is a part of the Town Guild (I think that’s what it was?) and Chae Eun herself is secretly a member of the White Peak Mountain Hearts, a tribe resembling Wahan through which Tanya discovers her hidden ties to the Asa clan.
We eventually find out that Chae Eun’s younger sister Noon Byul (Elena An/Ahn Hye Won) is in fact a Neanthal. Ha Rim found her as a sick child and took her in and severed her lineages when he found out what she was so she wouldn’t appear as one. Noon Byul is still very sickly and gets exhausted easily, especially when her Neanthal lineages somehow get reactivated. But she is definitely a very interesting character that will undoubtedly become an even stronger link to the remaining Neanthals, how many there may be left. The two wandering ones I mentioned before also come to find Noon Byul at one point, asking her to join them, but she chooses to stay with her Saram family and they leave her in peace. Honestly, I don’t know what Saram have against these Neanthals because they’re really just people if you try to just talk to them.
The fate of Chae Eun’s family is one of the most devastating things to happen in this series. My heart still hurts. And on the other hand I am beyond curious to see what will become of Chae Eun and Noon Byul in the second season.
After Tagon gets really badly wounded and they need to treat him as discreetly as possible so no one will see his purple blood (after he went on that rampage), Ha Rim is summoned to treat his injuries under careful supervision of Taealha, and when he leaves he does so in a hurry. Taealha, suspecting that he noticed something, orders a few Daekan soldiers to go after him and make sure he doesn’t try to leave the city. If he does, they are to kill him and his family.
Unfortunately, this is exactly what happens. We don’t get to know what it is that Ha Rim may have noticed, but he is clearly panicking and as soon as he gets home he tells his family that they need to leave right away. They flee, leaving only Doti behind (thank god, in hindsight). But in the woods they are met by the Daekan soldiers and are cut down one by one while trying to run away. First the mother is shot through the throat from the back and dies almost instantly. After begging for his daughters’ lives, Ha Rim also meets his end. While the soldiers are trying to separate the two screaming sisters to end them too, Noon Byul’s Neanthal lineages are activated and she rips apart all but one of the soldiers before passing out. After managing to take refuge in a hidden cave somewhere, Chae Eun proceeds to take care of Noon Byul and attempts to sever her lineages again, but Noon Byul asks her not to do that anymore.
This scene made such a big impact on me because it was just so god awfully merciless. These soldiers just went on to kill an entire innocent family without even wondering why they had to, it didn’t matter, it was an order. These girls having to watch their mother and father die in front of them, their screams… The acting was SO good it gave me goosebumps. I just kept hoping the soldiers wouldn’t actually do it, you know, you just wish their conscience will get the better of them but then they are still merciless. The impending danger of Noon Byul’s transformation was acted out very well too. I was very impressed by it.
To tie this paragraph to my previous one, like Eun Seom Noon Byul is also an example of someone who was raised by Saram while being of another race that she herself doesn’t even fully understand. She is accepted for who she is by this Saram family, even given the lovely name Noon Byul because Chae Eun thought her eyes looked like stars, praising their beauty rather than their strangeness.
I believe Chae Eun and Noon Byul are definitely key characters who will come back to contribute to the second season.

Let me talk a bit about the Daekan soldiers, because they are of course also very important characters, at least in Tagon’s part of the story. There’s this small core of warriors that are the most loyal to Tagon, so loyal that will blindly follow any order given by him. People in Arthdal really should start thinking for themselves, in my opinion, because this definitely went out of hand a couple of times.
Before I go on to the jolly bunch of blind followers, I want to talk about Mubaek. Mubaek (played by Park Hae Joon), has clearly had his doubts about Tagon ever since he was a teenager. Ever since the boy started performing passing rites for dying soldiers while this was actually something only members of the Asa clan were allowed to do, Mubaek seems to have been slightly wary of him.
After rewatching the first episode, I realized that it actually starts off with Mubaek’s narration, he is the first voice we hear and he immediately starts describing the story with ‘how everything turned out so wrong’. This in itself already suggests that he doesn’t agree with how certain events have unfolded. I’m really interested in Mubaek’s character and when he’ll finally start to show which side he’s on and what he’s thinking, because he does keep a lot to himself, even when Tagon starts doubting him from time to time, he never gives away that his heart is not in Daekan anymore.
Moving on to the ‘jolly bunch’ as I’ll call them, there’s Mubaek’s younger brother Mugwang (played by Hwang Hee). Mugwang is one of the most active participants in the destruction of the Wahan village, and we see him intentionally shoot some fire arrows into a cave where children are hiding, causing it to explode. Ergo, not a very sympathetic guy. He definitely had ZERO issues when it came to killing innocent people, everything for Arthdal. When they capture the Wahans and drag them all the way to Arthdal, at one point Mugwang is cursed by Tanya. She tells him that his heart will be ripped out on a night with a crescent moon, and later that the last words he’ll ever hear will be ‘You’re too late.’ While the other soldiers keep teasing him about it, Mugwang remains to be crabby towards Tanya. Even when she becomes the new leader of the Asa Clan, he also refuses to acknowledge her as such. But as it happens, he is the soldier ordered by Taealha to go after Ha Rim that night, and there just happens to be a crescent moon. Karma has it that his fellow soldiers even tease him about it again, merely an hour before his heart actually gets ripped out. When they proceeded to kill the mother and then the father, it dawned on me quite quickly that it was going to be Noon Byul. Only Neanthals could rip people’s hearts out and this event was definitely more than sufficient to trigger Noon Byul’s lineages (they’d been triggered before when her family was in danger). As soon as I realized what was going to happen, a part of me was excited. I don’t know what that says about me, because despite the fact that those soldiers were definitely the bad guys here it was still horrible what she did to them, but I was glad that Noon Byul was going to be the one to do it because I just knew that the most humiliating for Mugwang, more than seeing that curse come true, would be that it would be done by a woman. And yeah, I just really did not care for him much at that moment.
I’ll keep it shorter with the rest of the crew, consisting of Gitoha (played by Lee Ho Chul), Gilsun (Park Hyung Soo), Yeonbal (Choi Young Joon), and my favorite: Yangcha (played by Ki Do Hoon).
I don’t know what it was about Yangcha, but he is just so mysterious! Not just in how he keeps his face half-covered (it does come off at one point and I was like OMG BIG REVEAL but then it wasn’t even that big of a deal? Like I thought that maybe he had a big scar on the lower half of his face or something?), but there was something off about his behavior as well. In the first episode, Gilsun tells Mubaek that once Yangcha finishes his training, he might take over Mubaek’s position as Daekan’s best warrior. I don’t know if this will come back in some way, if more will be revealed about this, but I’m here for it. At the end of the season, Yangcha is Tanya’s personal security guard, and there’s just something mild about him now? Of course Tanya still doesn’t trust him 100% because he was also very actively involved in destroying her village and killing her tribe members.
Seriously, if there’s one thing that bothered me about this series is that there were so many characters I really, desperately wanted to like but just couldn’t because of my morals. I really thought these soldier characters were nice characters, and they were such a good bunch together. Amongst each other, they always had each other’s backs, they had such a strong brotherhood with Tagon and I just wished that they could have had the mind of their own to see that Tagon too, was slowly spiralling out of control. I wished that the way they acted when they were joking around with each other would have extended to other people as well, that they would’ve at least felt some sort of reluctance when being ordered to kill innocent people. But it was just a sport to them and they really didn’t care who they had to kill if they could use the opportunity to show their loyalty. I had mixed feelings about everyone! I wanted to like everyone, because as characters they were really interesting and well-written, but they just kept on doing bad things.
In the end, although I did think Mugwang had it coming, I still felt a little bad and also for Mubaek, losing his little brother like that. The scene where he came into the room and saw him laying there and just started crying… Ouch. That hurt my heart.

Before I move on to the Wahan people (can’t forget about them!), I want to talk about some more people in Arthdal that I found interesting. I just realized I haven’t talked much about Hae Tuak yet, and I really want to say something about her.
As Taealha’s personal servant, Hae Tuak initially seems like a very goofy woman, she is a kind of comical note and she doesn’t shy away from speaking her mind around Taealha and Tagon, as she feels comfortable around them. You could say she lets her guard down a bit when she’s around people she’s comfortable with, but she never loses her respect towards those higher in rank than her. Apparently, her comical and light-hearted way of acting is linked to a certain confidence, because she’s a very good fighter and she knows it. Taealha instructs her to teach Tanya how to fight when they first take her in, but Tuak doesn’t have the patience for this. While she knows her place in regards to the higher-ups, she can be very condescending towards people below her. As she is from the Hae Tribe, her loyalties lie with Mihol, but she also fondly supports Tagon and Taealha’s relationship.
Same as with the Daekan soldiers, I had mixed feelings about her. Her character in itself was very likeable, she really was a comical note amidst all of the conspiracies between clan leaders, but still I couldn’t fully like her because she was still an Arthdal person, which means that she wasn’t against physically punishing people. She was true to Taealha, but her intentions also become ambiguous at some point. So I just didn’t really know what to think of her. Her acting also seemed to be more modern and a bit out of place than the rest, it didn’t bother me so much because it made her character more unique, but in another way she also felt a bit like the odd man out in some situations. I really didn’t like her attitude towards Tanya, she could get quite obnoxious when she felt like she was in charge.

Someone else I liked was Hae Yeo Bi (played by Park Sung Yeon). She was Mihol’s most faithful servant, but she was more of a trustee than a servant, I think. He always kept her with him and she always followed his commands. I liked her dynamic with Hua Tuak a lot, because you could see that they were not on very good terms, and they were both pretty good fighters. It could have made for more comical face-offs between the two, but I guess there wasn’t much time for that. Yeo Bi was definitely shocked by Mihol’s death, but I believe that she’s now going to follow Taealha in her new mission to fulfill what her father started, what’s left to do for the Hae clan. I hope Yeo Bi will get into some more action in the second season, I liked her character.

I have mentioned Asa Ron before, and I think I’ve already said enough about him (lol), but I do want to say something about the Asa Clan. I wish I’d learned more about how their clan became connected to Tagon’s because they were so different, yet they kept pretending like they were on the same page. So the Asa Clan is like a clan of high priests and priestesses, they’re a bit spiritual, you could say. Asa Ron is the leader until he ultimately gets killed by Tagon, whereafter Tanya replaces him, but not after she has to prove that she’s the direct descendant of Asa Shin, one of the earliest Asa Clan leaders.
The whole Asa Clan just has this Elvish vibe and I can’t describe it any other way. They all looked really elegant, with long white robes, both men and woman with long hair. They performed rituals to convey messages to the gods and stuff like that, but mostly they prided themselves on their own power within Arthdal – they kept the religion going and that was one of the most important things to the union members/subjects of Arthdal. They would always support the Asa Clan because of this, which always threw a spanner in the works for Tagon whenever he wanted to act against Asa Ron.
Asa Ron ended up being a bit pathetic, in my opinion. He barely escapes Tagon’s rampage and then gets all excited about learning Tagon’s secret of being an Igutu, because now he has a hold over him. But then he happens to come across Mungtae, of all people, who has by then decided to stick by Tagon as he’s the most powerful person, and he delivers Asa Ron right to him. It was unfortunate for the old man, but I honestly didn’t know what else he would have been able to do if they’d let him live, so I guess it had to happen. There were two Asa Clan members who were always by Asa Ron’s side, Asa Yon (played by Chang Ryul) and Asa Mot (played by Seo Eun Ah). I don’t know how they were related, how anyone in the Asa Clan was related, because besides Asa Ron everyone else seemed relatively young. Anyways, Asa Mot is at one point wedded off to Tagon to connect the Saenyeok Tribe and the Asa Clan (much to Taealha’s dismay), but you can’t really call it a marriage since the two care nothing for each other. After Asa Ron dies and the whole clan is reformed, Asa Mot is lastly seen being punished to having her feet cut off, together with every single family member of any of the people who had seen Tagon’s purple blood that one night. This was also a horrible display, by the way, how they even dragged little children along that literally had nothing to do with anything. Anyways, we don’t see what happens to Asa Mot or her other clan members after that.
The only White Mountain Tribe/Asa Clan member that is seen to be spared from immediate death is the Great Mother Elder, Asa Sakan (played by Son Sook). She is kept a prisoner and we even see Taealha visit her at the end, although we don’t get to see what she asks of her. This woman seems to know the most about the link between Tanya, Eun Seom and Saya, and I’m sure this will also come back in the second season.

Finally, one on to the Wahan people! Although at least half the tribe dies – first when they’re attacked during their festival and then some along the way, they showed the kind of connectedness that I would’ve like to see in the Daekan soldiers as well. I mentioned before that there is a big contrast between the people of Wahan and the people of Arthdal. Both the Daekan bunch and the Wahan Tribe were close, like family, but the ironic thing is that the Wahan people, while literally not concerned with any other type of people beyond themselves, still were more able to show empathy to their unknown surroundings than the Daekan soldiers ever could, despite having visited many places and dealing with many different people. The Wahan people, forcibly plucked from their homes, tortured and forced to work while being treated like animals, still never lose their kindness. Despite going through hell, Tanya’s father Yeolsan (played by Jung Seok Yong) keeps his curiosity of making things. His genuine curiosity even makes Tagon decide to let him work in the Fortress of Fire to learn more about forging methods. Despite what has been done to them, these people would still never resort to revenge, to make others experience what they’d been through.
The only person from Wahan that loses his way is Mungtae (played by Park Jin). During an earlier escape attempt at the Fortress of Fire, Eun Seom incidentally stumbles upon Buksoe and Dalsae (played by Kim Cheung Kil and Shin Joo Hwan) and manages to get them to safety. The rest isn’t so lucky, and Mungtae has carried a grudge ever since; in his eyes, they purposely left the rest of them behind to save themselves. Eun Seom wouldn’t be Eun Seom if he wasn’t already a new plan to save the rest of them as well, but Mungtae’s faith has by then already started to shatter. By the time Eun Seom actually attempts to come back and save them, Mungtae rats him out to the Daekan Forces that are holding them. Eun Seom and Dalsae (Shin Joo Hwan) are then captured again. Meanwhile, Gilsun is impressed by Mungtae’s betrayal and even helps him become a guard. So now Mungtae has got things going for himself, but the fear returns when he hears that the people he betrayed are coming back to Arthdal, because he knows they will tell on him to the other Wahan people, his family that was so glad to see him again, that he betrayed them. Mungtae is then also consumed by a blind greed for power, or at least to remain on the side of the person with the most power, and he also turns into one of Tagon’s mindless soldiers. That scene where he just suddenly starts hacking into those people who were questioning Tagon about how their tribe leaders suddenly disappeared (they belonged to the people who died at Tagon’s hand for having seen his purple blood), was terrifying. Tanya was there to witness the whole thing and you could just see the terror on her face. To see one of her brothers, one of her dear friends and tribe members that she’d grown up with as a child, suddenly behave like this, that’s exactly what I meant earlier when I said that slowly but surely, people are slipping away from her. They start to take on new roles, new lives, they adapt to their new situations and circumstances, for better or for worse.
By the way, is it just me or did Buksoe just disappear? I believe he managed to get away while Eun Seom and Dalsae were capture, but we haven’t seen him since. I wonder what happened to him and if he’ll come back one day.

After escaping the Daekan soldiers again, Eun Seom and Dalsae flee with some other slaves and eventually meet the Momo Tribe. Their leader (or Xabara), Karika (played by Karata Erika) becomes indebted to Eun Seom after he saves her and her baby from soldiers that come after her, and she is now also a friendly ally. She and her people are also the ones who save Eun Seom from that waterfall judgement trial of the Ago Tribe.
Can I just say how much I loved to see such wonderfully powerful badass women in this drama? In fantasy series like this, ones that are set in ancient times, women always tend to be the oppressed. The only women with any kind of power are from rich families, usually, they have social status, but I really liked seeing some strong female Tribe leaders.
It’s a pity that the Ago Tribe was only introduced so late in the series, I haven’t fully formed an opinion about them yet. I still don’t know if they can be fully trusted, but they are definitely going to play a big role in the second season. After all, they’re going up against Arthdal with Eun Seom as their new leader against Tagon!
I love how, even with the seemingly happy ending on Eun Seom’s side, where he is carried off on the shoulders of the Ago Tribe, there is still a snake in the grass. Tagon mentions in the last episode that he has a spy in the Ago Tribe, and at the very end we find out that that’s Suhana (played by Kim Jung Young), who was previously the right hand of the Ago Tribe’s Tae Clan leader. Earning her name as Red Claw as she sends her messages to Tagon through a hawk with red claws, I wonder what methods she’ll be using to spy on Eun Seom as well. Seriously, the ending of this season had me so hyped!

I want to talk a bit about Ipsaeng as well. Ipsaeng (played by Kim Sung Chul) is one of the other slaves that Eun Seom and Dalsae manage to escape with and he is possibly the most untrustworthy companion Eun Seom could’ve chosen. They travel together to deliver the news one of the slaves’ deaths to his wife, and in that journey alone, Ipsaeng betrays Eun Seom like five times, even leaving him to get attacked by a bear one time! And STILL Eun Seom comes back for him. I loved how Ipsaeng was like the polar opposite of Eun Seom. Their upbringings couldn’t have been more different and still they managed to bond. Their dynamic was continuously interesting to watch, because they both just wouldn’t budge to agree with the other’s way of thinking.
Ipsaeng belongs to the Tae Clan of the Ago Tribe, but initially claims that he can’t go back because he’s not recognized by his people anymore. However, it turns out that he was actually the son of the clan leader, but that his uncle killed his parents and sent him into slavery when he was a kid. Understatement to say he doesn’t really feel any familial connections with them anymore. After we meet his uncle, the one Suhana serves, we can see why (great cameo appearance of Go Chang Suk, btw). But at least Ipsaeng comes around and stays with Eun Seom as he becomes their new Inaishingi.

In-between, I also really want to give a shoutout to the amazing OST of Ailee’s ‘Poem of Destiny’ because it just fit the series’ concept SO well and it gave me goosebumps. It was similar to how I experienced Hwasa’s ‘Orbit’ for The King: Eternal Monarch. I loved it.

I want to close off this review – I think I’ve written quite enough by now, I even rewrote some parts because I felt I didn’t express things well enough the first time around – with my usual cast comments.
All in all, I really liked the cast and I also liked that there were a lot of people I didn’t know. Of course, since the actors in this drama looked very different from what they’d look like in a modern times K-Drama, chances are I may not have recognized some people that I do actually know, haha.
In my continuous remarks about how much this drama reminded me of Game of Thrones, can I just say that they did a terrific job with the casting? I wouldn’t even call it an ‘Asian version’ of GoT. As far as I could see, there were no major references to ancient Asian culture, there were no temples or other traditionally looking buildings you’d find in ancient Asia, the clothing also wasn’t typically Asian. The setting was just as fitting for an international fantasy series like GoT, and I loved how it didn’t feel off at all that the actors happened to be Asian. Everyone just fit so well with their characters, and I just wanted to express that I was really impressed with how they pulled this series off.

First of all, Jang Dong Geon. I can see on DramaWiki that he did a LOT of dramas in the 90s, but that he had a long hiatus between 2000 and 2012. I’ve personally never seen anything of him before. I mentioned earlier that he reminded me of Thorin Oakenshield and I mean that in a good way. I think he was a very good cast for this role, he just exuded that energy of Tagon, sometimes gentle and kind and just, and then suddenly he could show this intimidating and threatening streak. He showed a wide variety of expressions and emotions, which was awesome. I think Tagon must have been a very challenging role to play, but it suited him very well. I really wish to gain some more sympathy for his character and less mixed feelings!

Although I could swear I’ve seen Kim Ok Bin somewhere before – her face looks so familiar! – I haven’t seen anything of her, either! I see on DramaWiki that she’s the vocalist of a rockband and that her dance moves have earned her the name of Korean Beyoncé and now I’m intrigued, haha. Anyways, again, perfect casting fit. She had the exact energy for the meticulous Taealha, just the right fit for someone who had to keep a straight face and hide her emotions to stay in control. I think Taealha also is a very challenging role to play, and as the actress of course she had be to be exactly clear of what her character’s intentions were, even though she could never say them out loud. That meticulous part of her, the way she never revealed how she was truly feeling while you could see all those signs on her face that she was having a lot of thought, that really impressed me about her.

I’ve seen a couple of things with Song Joong Ki, like Sungkyunkwan Scandal, Descendants of the Sun and the movie Space Sweepers, but I never really connected with him for some reason.
This drama, however, changed my view of him for the better. First of all, because he plays two roles, Eun Seom and Saya. I don’t know how he did it, but they really were two completely different people. It was brilliant. At some moments I didn’t even feel like I was watching the same actor, that’s how distinctively he played them. One different glance in his eye was enough to change the whole vibe of the character and that’s such a gift. I really loved Eun Seom, he’s just one big ball of goodness. Saya scares me a bit, to be honest, but he also fascinates me. And can we just appreciate how good Song Joong Ki looks with long hair and makeup?!?! I really liked his performance here, it may be my favorite performance of him so far.

I think I’ve mentioned this in a previous review of a drama with her, but Kim Ji Won is really growing on me as an actress. I’ve seen her in To The Beautiful You, The Heirs, Descendants of the Sun, Fight For My Way, and Lovestruck in the City. The thing with Kim Ji Won is that she’s finally getting detached from the “bitchy” roles that she used to get ALL the time. There was a time when I couldn’t see her as anyone else than ‘that actress that always plays the bitchy girl’. In Arthdal Chronicles, she’s anything but that.
Tanya is a victim that’s trying to make the best of a situation that she doesn’t see a way out of. I really liked her character, mostly how smart she was. I was surprised how fast she made the connection when she discovered Saya, how she didn’t just blurt out ‘Eun Seom??’ even though she did think it was him when she first saw him in her dream, but that she immediately thought ‘Huh, this must be Eun Seom’s twin’ and made the connection with the things in his room that Eun Seom had described to her from his dream. She also managed to immediately make use of Eun Seom’s dream stories and remembered enough to make Taealha believe that she really did have some psychic abilities. She really saw what was going on, and that was really cool. Rather than just being a deer in headlights all the time, she was constantly analyzing her situation, trying to think of a solution the best way she could.
It’s possibly the meakest role I’ve seen of Kim Ji Won so far, but it just proves that she’s very versatile and she really shouldn’t just be casted as one typecast because she’s that good.

There a lot of actors that I didn’t recognize but after searching them on DramaWiki I found out I actually saw several dramas with them, so I guess it really is the power of make-up and costume? That or I just really don’t remember people, haha.

Park Hae Joon, who played Mubaek. I’m really curious to learn more about his character in the second season because it seems like his doubts about Tagon are increasing by the day. He is the only one who finds out about Tanya, Eun Seom and Saya being the three prophecied children and he seems to be determined to keep this secret and also protect Tanya. I see on DramaWiki that I’ve seen Park Hae Joon before in Doctor Stranger and My Mister, but honestly, I don’t remember. He does have a familiar face though. He was one of the characters that I found really interesting because you can just see his beliefs start to waver at some point and I’m curious how he’s eventually going to act on that.

Apparently Hwang Hee (Mugwang) was in Tomorrow With You and had a cameo in Lovestruck in the City. Honestly, I need to look at faces more properly, haha. But yeah, despite him being an incredibly cruel guy, for some reason I kept hoping he would be a better person. I was hoping that he’d have a better conscience, so I have mixed feelings about his character. I guess I really wanted to like him but my principles didn’t allow me to, lol. Anyways, he played the character very well, I can’t wait to suddenly spot him in a modern time drama and be like ‘????’ , haha.

I need to mention Son Sook here, who played the Mother Elder of the White Mountain Tribe that the Asa Clan belonged to. Seriously, Son Sook always plays the sweetests and most fragile grannies, yet in Arthdal Chronicles… I don’t think I’ve ever seen er perform a more vital role than this before! I almost didn’t recognize her, also because of the makeup, but also because up until now, the roles I’ve seen of her have all been like the ones in My Mister and Room No. 9, fragile old handicapped ladies. It was so cool to see her in such a steadfast role for a change!

I recognized Jo Sung Ha (Mihol), and I see that I’ve seen him in Sungkyunkwan Scandal and 100 Day Husband, which are both historical dramas, so maybe that’s why this look looked so familiar on him. He has the face of a cunning man, and I think that’s also what made him a very good fit for Mihol. It must have been quite a fun role to play, because he was as meticulous as his daughter (or the other way around), and although Tagon saw through him multiple times, he did manage to keep his head up and survive – until Tagon’s greed to own every piece of knowledge in Arthdal by himself. Mihol ended up dying without regrets, he didn’t give in to Tagon and Saya, and he died in the knowledge that at least his daughter was still loyal to him, after all, so that must have been a consolance. Despite his plans against Tagon you could see that he really cared about his daughter and his clan.

I just wanted to mention that I saw Park Sung Yeon in Abyss just before this, I didn’t really discuss her then because she was a fairly minor character, the sweet housekeeper in Ahn Hyo Seop’s house. But now, as Yeo Bi, she suddenly she had a completely different vibe! She was definitely not someone to joke around with either! It was so cool to see her transform from one drama to another like that. Another badass female character that I liked in this series. I want to see her get into some more action in the second season.

Yoon Sa Bong, who played Hae Tuak. I am shook because apparently I’ve seen so many dramas with her and I don’t remember her in ANY of them. She was in Shopping King Louie, Tomorrow With You, Fight For My Way, and also in a couple more I still want to watch! I gotta keep my eye open for her now. On the one hand, I liked Tuak’s light-heartedness, her jokes and exaggerated complaints when she was forced to carry out a tiresome task. She lightened up the series in the midst of all the chaos that was going on. She was refreshing and comical amongst, but I still had mixed feelings about her. I wanted to like her without any restraints, I just wanted her to be a good person in every aspect, but I suppose being from Arthdal already takes the ability away from a person. I am curious to see more action from her too though, because I feel like they still kept her true skills hidden for the most part. I did like the actress in this drama, even though I something felt like she didn’t fit in as well as the others. I’m not sure what it is about her.

I didn’t know Go Bo Kyul was in this! I’ve seen her in several things before, like Producer, Cinderella and the Four Knights, Goblin, Go Back Couple and That Man Oh Soo. I really liked Chae Eun’s character, I really hope she and her sister can come back in the second season. She was so helpful and caring, she really cared about people even though they weren’t from her clan/tribe. She cared about Eun Seom after just having met him. She initially kept ushering him to get out of Arthdal because it wasn’t safe for him, she really didn’t want him to get hurt. Her heart was in the right place and she would never harm anyone the way she was hurt, even after what happened to her parents. In my book, that’s what makes you a good person. I was really impressed by her performance here, especially the scene I talked about before. I’ve never seen her act so desperately before, it was really heartbreaking.

Of the Wahan people, I liked seeing Jung Seok Yong as Tanya’s father, he’s always a friendly face to see in K-Drama and he also didn’t look out of place because I’ve seen him in a historical drama before as well. I know him from I Miss You, Moonlight Drawn By Clouds, Tunnel, Lookout, Room No. 9 and Move to Heaven. I’ve seen Shin Joo Hwan (Dalsae) in Producer, Cheese in the Trap and Circle, apparently! He was probably my favorite of the remaining Wahan people, I hope he gets some more action in the second season too. And Go Na Hee as Doti was absolutely adorable, apparently she was also in Hidden Identity, Madame Antoine, Strong Woman Do Bong Soon, Ruler: Master of the Mask and Fight for my Way.

Lastly I just wanted to say it was cool to see Karata Erika and Tripathi Anupam in this series as well.
Karata played the badass leader of the Momo Tribe, Karika. The funny thing is that I recognized her but I couldn’t place her in any K-Drama I’d watched – and then I found out she’s Japanese and I actually knew her from some J-Drama like Koe Koi, Kizoku Tantei and Todome no Kiss! It’s not often that we see Japanese actors in K-Dramas, and I definitely didn’t expect it, but it wasn’t out of place at all, it was just very cool. It must have been a challenge to master that language!
And Tripathi Anupam was there too! Honestly, I haven’t even seen Squid Game but I know his face from all the pictures, I actually recognized him from something I haven’t even watched. He was someone in Arthdal from the town council/guild that Chae Eun’s father also belonged to, I think. He was seen quite regularly, responding to the events happening in the capital. I liked that it was normalized that the actors weren’t all just Korean, but Asian in general.

To conclude, I would just like to say some final things about the series. First and foremost, it looked absolutely stunning. I read that they filmed everything on location in Brunei, so they must have had quite the budget. All the sceneries, the sets, the locations, the nature with the waterfalls… everything looked so beautiful. I especially liked the spot in Iark where Eun Seom and Tanya practiced that dance together in the beginning, that was so pretty.
I wonder how much sets they build by themselves. I can imagine the market place and the rooms in the palace being built sets, but the birdview shots of Arthdal were probably CGI. In any case, they made everything look really beautiful. I really felt like I was in a different world, I’m still processing that these are actually existing places on our own earth!
I really loved the costumes and the makeup as well. I liked the make-up that Tanya and Eun Seom got during that festival, and that it came back with the White Peak Mountain Hearts. Taealha’s dresses were GORGEOUS. Honestly, everything seemed so well designed, so well thought out, the attention to detail to which look fit which character the best, all the way to the hairstyles. I was curious to see how they would visualize all of this. I’m not always a big fan of fantasy, and things can become overexaggerated easily in my eyes, but I can’t express enough that I think they made it look absolutely stunning.
And yes, for the last time, it really DID remind me of Game of Thrones, haha. From the characters to the amount of manslaughter, but also in the mapping of the world and, in technical terms, the opening sequence! Every episode’s opening sequence is different if you pay attention (which I did start doing at some point), it shows different places and figures/symbols that would feature in that specific episode. And I also love how they invented different languages for the series. I listened carefully, and I think I was able to pick up a few words to prove that the Neanthal language may actually just be Korean backwards, haha. But then there was also the language of the Momo Tribe, and just… so much attention to detail!

I said in the very beginning that I wasn’t really sure how I felt about the series. This was mostly the case when I still had a hard time getting into it and when I felt that this wasn’t really my kind of genre. However, I did manage to get into it eventually and then I really started appreciating this series for the gem that it is. It’s so unique in its kind and genre, and they really put in a lot of effort to make it look like it really took place in a different world.
It took a bit of time for the storylines to get where they needed to get all the characters in position to start off the real story, but from then on it only got more interesting. I kept feeling those plot twists, too! I even changed my ranking of this series halfway because suddenly it did all start to get exciting and I did manage to get invested in it. Honestly, I feel like this series could’ve easily aired internationally, it would’ve fit right into that genre of historical fantasy.
This is a series that I would definitely have to rewatch in order to not miss anything and fully grasp what is happening from the beginning. I mean, come on, the two babies are literally mentioned and shown in the first episode, so why did I still go 👁👄👁 when they actually showed the flashback of Asa Hon, her Neanthal man, and the two babies side by side? Exactly, because I hadn’t been paying attention.
Paying attention is very important with this series, because if you do, you’ll realize that the writing is actually quite genius. They are foreshadowing all kinds of stuff in the first episode that you completely forget about until it suddenly happens and you’re like WHATT. So yeah, it did keep intriguing me to the end and now I just really want Eun Seom and Tanya to be reunited so now I HAVE to watch the second season. Besides the long-awaited reunion on Eun Seom and Tanya, I’m also very much looking forward to Eun Seom and Tagon facing off against each other, and also to Eun Seom and Saya coming face to face. I wonder how they’re going to film that. I want to know more about the Neanthals and about certain characters like Mubaek. I want Chae Eun and Noon Byul to reappear. Also, I really want to know more about this prophecy of the three children, with the mirror, the bell and the sword, because I couldn’t really follow this. I just understood that Tanya, Eun Seom and Saya were connected because all three of them were born on the same night under a blue comet, but apart from some speculations this storyline hasn’t really played out yet so I’m hoping to get more clarity about that. I just have so many questions that haven’t been answered yet, the story is still wide open, anything can still happen and I’m really curious to see how the chronicles will continue.

We’ll probably have to wait until 2023 for the second season to air, so I will probably have to reread this review, at least, when it finally comes out.
Despite my lack of investment in the beginning, this series actually managed to pull me in and even change my mind about the fantasy genre. It’s still not my favorite genre, not gonna lie, but this series was really well-made, really well-written, and really well-acted. I just want to see how it ends, even if it’s just to get closure. It took me a long time to write this review, as I’ve said I even rewrote it which also took me a long time. I just kept thinking of things that I’d missed, but now I think I’ve really added everything I wanted to say about it.
It’s a series unlike any kind of K-Drama I’ve ever seen before and I’m glad I watched it. Most importantly, I have been confronted with the fact that some series really require serious undivided attention, sometimes they even require pausing the screen to make sure that what’s being said is fully understood. Rewatching the first episode cleared up so many things that I could’ve already known throughout the series if I’d just been more attentive the first time. You really got to keep your head in the game with this one, it’s definitely not just a casual story.

I’m going on to an in-between break drama special before starting on the next long awaited Netflix K-Drama, so you’ll read back from me soon, probably! Also because I have some more free days coming up! ^^ Until then, bye-bee!!

Disclaimer: this is a review, and as such it contains spoilers of the whole series. Please proceed to read at your own risk if you still plan on watching this show or if you haven’t finished it yet. You have been warned.

Abyss
(어비스 / Eobiseu)
MyDramaList rating: 7.5/10

Hey everyone, I’m back! It’s been a while, but if you know about this drama series then I think you can understand why this took me a long time to finish. I was planning on finishing it in March, but you can’t predict what life will throw at you to get in the way, so I ended up finishing it in April instead, a full month (!) after my last review. When I started this drama, from the start I had NO idea how I was going to write a review about this, so I really hope that I can make it a worthwhile analysis. Because of the intensity of the drama and everything that happens in it, I will try even harder to not linger on details too much but focus mostly on my own thoughts while watching this. As it’s a quite lengthy drama in which a LOT of heavy stuff happens, here too I would like to add a trigger warning: this drama (and consequently this review) deals with themes such as: crime, (serial) murder, (child) abuse, and trauma. It may look like a fun scifi drama from the poster, but it was much heavier than I expected, so be prepared! Now, without further ado, let’s get started!

Abyss is a 16-episode Netflix K-Drama with each episode lasting for about 1 hour and 5 minutes. The story as a whole is quite complicated, but let me try to phrase it as simply as possible. It’s about two people, Cha Min (initially played by Ahn Se Ha) and Go Se Yeon (initially played by Kim Sa Rang). They have known each other since high school and there have been some tensions between them since Min has always has a crush on Se Yeon, but she’s always rejected him. Se Yeon used to be the most popular, pretty girl in school and while Min was from a wealthy family, his looks have never been a advantageous feature for him. As adults, Min is now the director of his mother’s company Lan Cosmetics, whereas Se Yeon is a successful prosecutor. At the beginning of the series, she is in charge of a case known as the Eomsan-dong Serial Killer case.
To get straight to the point: both these people die in the first episode. Min is the first, and his death is the one that sets everything in motion. Whilst hanging from a rooftop in a failed suicide attempt – his girlfriend just dumped him and he’s not taken it well – he is hit by a mysterious alien object that launches him into the sky. He is revived, however, by two equally mysterious figures. They revive with a glowing marble they call ‘Abyss’, and when he comes back to life, his appearance has completely changed into that of a handsome, tall young man (welcome Ahn Hyo Seop). He gets to keep the marble and the alien people tell him to they urge him to make good use of it, but to “keep it safe rather than use it if possible”. They don’t give him any additional information before they disappear again. Min now has to deal with the consequences of his revival, namely that no one recognizes him and no one will believe his story that he is Cha Min. He meets Se Yeon a couple of times, too, but isn’t able to disclose any info about what happened to him to her.
Not much later, Se Yeon herself is murdered in her own home – she becomes a victim of the very serial killer who’s case she’s investigating. After Min hears what’s happened to her, he manages to sneak into the mortuary and revives Se Yeon with the marble, but Abyss has the same effect on her as it did on him: she transforms into a completely different person (welcome Park Bo Young). As it turns out, when revived by Abyss, your appearance changes to ‘what your soul looks like’. Now, the two only have each other to rely on and in their new bodies, they strive to solve the case that is ruining so many lives around them.

We already find out in the first episode that the most likely suspect to be the serial killer is Oh Yeong Chul (played by Lee Sung Jae). We first meet him as a successful surgeon, and he is associated with the case because his special way of suturing is a match with the signature mark of the serial killer – he sutures his victim’s wounds up in a specific way after he kills them. However, Se Yeon gets a little too close to confront him, she visits him at the hospital one time and that’s enough for him to know he needs to get rid of her.
The cruel fate is that Oh Yeong Chul actually got murdered himself on the night of Se Yeon’s murder. He was attacked by the father of one of his earlier victims and was left on the street near Se Yeon’s house. He was found there by Min, who had just received Abyss and immediately (although unknowingly) uses it on him. I mean, yeah, you find a severly wounded man on the street, your first instinct would be to help him, right, it wouldn’t occur to you that this is actually the devil himself. Anyways, so Min actually revives the Oh Yeong Chul by accident, who then goes back on his way to kill Se Yeon. Things be messed up.
Abyss leaves a mark on Oh Yeong Chul as well. Although he doesn’t change appearance altogether, he is made to look much older than he originally was. Which gives him an advantage because people don’t recognize him immediately either and he can pull off the ‘innocent grandpa act’ for a while.
Let me just say that, if I thought Come and Hug Me was intense for a drama about a serial killer, Abyss was that + 5.0. The serial killer in this story was a complete psychopath with 0 empathy for anyone, not even his own family members. He completely believed that he had the right to kill all those people and this is what made him all the more dangerous. Because he didn’t even need a motive. Someone could just bump into him on the street or get a bit too close to a place where he was hiding something, and he would chase them down and kill them that same day if possible. It was INTENSE.

The whole main story is basically a cat and mouse game between Min/Se Yeon and Oh Yeong Chul. And it just didn’t stop. Just when they get Oh Yeong Chul arrested, it’s revealed that he had an accomplice, the person who actually killed Se Yeon that night because she was still (be it barely) alive after Oh Yeong Chul’s attack. And then they started searching for this accomplice. Just when they find out who the accomplice is, Oh Yeong Chul escapes and they have to go back after him. It was just an endless loop of a situation that didn’t seem to get better and that kept dragging multiple people with it in its merciless step.
Mostly, Oh Yeong Chul’s own family. We find out that, not only is he an active serial killer, but he also used to be a monster at home. He abused his wife and (step)children to no end, eventually driving his wife to losing her mind. He hid her in a very desolate and hard to locate nursing home. His children both disappeared from his household along the way, but are quickly reunited with him again after he kills Se Yeon. And here’s where we’ll connect the dots.
Seo Ji Wook (played by Kwon Soo Hyun) is Se Yeon’s colleague prosecutor and the son of a famous Judge. He works with Se Yeon on the Eomsan-dong case and is seen persuading her to leave the case to him in the first episode, but she refuses. After she’s murdered, we don’t see a lot of emotional response to her, which seems weird because it seems like they were on good terms. However, something seems off about him and his relation to the case they were working on together.
On the other hand, we have Jang Hee Jin (played by Han So Hee), the girlfriend that Min was attempting suicide over. She was introduced to Min by Se Yeon, and they seemed to be quite lovey-dovey for a while, but she wasn’t sincere about their relationship (I believe). I think I remember her admitting at some point that she was initially mostly interested in Min’s money and social status, however she did get more annoyed when she realized he was still completely head over heels for Se Yeon even when he was with her. Anyways, she’s kidnapped and held captive by Oh Yeong Chul for a period of time in the beginning of the series. At first we don’t know why this is, but she is forced to help him a couple of time and even when she’s released, she’s still kept on a leash because somehow, it appears he knows something about the whereabouts of her mother who she’s been wanting to find.
It takes a while to unfold, but then it’s revealed that Ji Wook and Hee Jin used to be Oh Tae Jin and Oh Soo Jin, Oh Yeong Chul’s kids (or stepkid in Hee Jin’s case). They’ve both changed their identities after cutting their ties with their abusive father – Tae Jin got himself adopted by that Judge (who had some skeletons in his own closet) and stood in for that Judge’s own comatose son, and Soo Jin went her own way as well. Their relations to Oh Yeong Chul still get them very much involved in this case, especially when Hee Jin is put in the dire situation of being manipulated by her step-father whilst she is being ‘protected’ by Min and Se Yeon and knows about their Abyss-related secrets as well.

I think it’ll be better to discuss the main characters in more depth one by one. There is just too much to unravel here and I’m afraid I will lose my structure if I don’t go step by step.
Let’s start with Se Yeon. Despite being from a not exceptionally wealthy family (her parents own a chicken restaurant), she is the pride and glory of her parents. She’s exceptionally pretty, all the guys in school are pining for her, she’s very smart and sharp, and a force to be reckoned with as a prosecutor as well. We only get to see here in her original appearance in the first episode and some flashbacks, but we find out the most about her while she’s in her new ‘form’, as I’ll call it. While from the start it seems like she’s always been a little harsh on Min, it is later revealed that she has wavered about her feelings for him before, but that the timing was never right. Throughout the series, she becomes more and more aware of the fact that Min has always been her closest ally, that he’s always been by her side more than anyone else. And of course, the events they go through brings them closer to each other than ever.
One of the most interesting things that stuck with me as I was watching the series was why she took on the appearance that she did, because in her case, her new appearance actually belonged to someone she knew. Lawyer Lee Mi Do, a rival figure of Se Yeon’s at work (who very conveniently undertook major plastic surgery around the same time that Se Yeon’s appearance changed, so even when she came back, they didn’t look anything alike). Anyways, I really wondered how it could be that Se Yeon took on Mi Do’s exact appearance. According to Abyss, people revived by it would take on the appearance of their soul, so why did her soul look like her rival? Was it because they weren’t as different from each other as they’d initially thought or something? She did end up being on better terms with Mi Do (after her plastic surgery played by Song Sang Eun), but in the end I still wondered why in her case she changed into someone, an existing person, that she personally knew. It would’ve been interesting if it was a bit more elaborated on how Abyss worked in that aspect.
In the beginning it does work in her advantage, because Mi Do is someone known to her colleagues and her appearance enables her to get back into her office, at least. It’s also beneficial in the sense that she can make use of Mi Do’s ex-boyfriend who works at the police force (I will talk in more detail about him later), so at least she has one person on her side there as well. But overall, Se Yeon goes through a great deal. Not only is she murdered and revived by Abyss TWICE, she suffers a great deal of grief, loss and betrayal in-between as well. She has to deal with not only herself, but also her parents and other people like the real Mi Do being targeted by Oh Yeong Chul. She can’t tell her parents or anyone who’s not in the loop about Abyss the truth about who she really is, and that kills her inside. The only one who truly understands what she’s going through and helps her through it is Min, and their relationship is built up as such that, at the end of it, she’s become so dependent on him that she doesn’t want to be apart from him ever again.

Cha Min actually manages to get back into his own life quite smoothly, he manages to convince everyone including his own mother that he’s had a complete make-over/plastic surgery/metamorphosis and everyone seems to buy it, with as an extra argument that no one is really surprised he would resort to this because of his former looks. Anyways, he’s able to get back to his own job and his own life, he doesn’t have to hide who he is like Se Yeon. And even though he is a bit cross at her in the beginning for how she’s treated him, and about how this situation has messed up his life as well, it’s just in his nature to be kind. He treats Se Yeon the same as he’s always done, because his love for her has never truly wavered, even when he was with Hee Jin for a while. He also still feels very guilty about the fact that he’s apparently revived Oh Yeong Chul so that he could go on to kill Se Yeon, even though of course he couldn’t have known about any of that. He feels that he needs to protect Se Yeon at all costs now, and sticks by her side like glue.
The only family Min has is his mother, since his father died away of a disease when he was in high school. His mother (played by Yoon Yoo Sun) is one of the only characters in the series who is completely kept in the dark about everything that’s happening. She’s just the mother that cares about her son. She does help him track someone or find out something a few times, but not aware of what she’s actually helping him with. I think it was a good decision of Min to keep his mother out of it all, because it would’ve only put her at risk too and Oh Yeong Chul would’ve definitely come after her as well at some point.
Min too goes through a lot. First he’s accidentally killed by aliens, but he also gets murdered again by Oh Yeong Chul at some point and loses consequently Abyss to him for a while. He tries his best to protect everyone but sometimes doesn’t succeed and he has to watch how several people he cares about around him get involved and endangered by the whole situation. We see him struggle multiple times with using Abyss, and that proves that he really also doesn’t want to use it lightly. In the beginning it seemed like Abyss didn’t really matter to him that much, that he just thought it gave him a handsome new face and was thankful for that, but he did figure out how it worked faster than Oh Yeong Chul did when he temporarily became Abyss’ owner and Min was definitely more careful about using it after he accidentally revived a serial killer with it. He carried a lot of worries with him and although he was always trying to lighten the mood and make sure Se Yeon felt safe, we could see it start to eat at him, especially at the end.

Park Dong Chul (played by Lee Shi Eon) is the police officer I mentioned before. He used to be Lawyer Lee Mi Do’s boyfriend, and even after they broke up because she went abroad, she still has a hold on him because as soon as Se Yeon (looking like Mi Do) shows up, he’s back at her feet. This initially works mostly in Se Yeon’s favor, but she does start to feel bad about using his good intentions like that, especially when Dong Chul starts suggesting they get back together. When the real Mi Do returns with her new face, he has a hard time adjusting to that as well. Anyways, Park Dong Chul is a very important character in this series since he’s the main characters’ direct link to the police investigation of Oh Yeong Chul, and they are able to accomplish a lot together. He and his colleagues occasionally make mistakes, it happens, but he does prove to be in the right occupation as he keeps pushing that the case isn’t finished yet, even though it really irks his boss. He is also let in on Abyss, even though he can’t see it (only people who have been revived by it can) and on the whole transformation of Se Yeon and Min. He’s the best ally they have throughout the series and he’s just generally a good guy who wants to serve justice to wrongdoers.

Hee Jin, as I mentioned before, is just a very easy target for Oh Yeong Chul. Because of their ties from the past, and the hold he has over her because of her mother, she can’t refuse him easily simply because she doesn’t have the physical power to go against him. As we say, ‘a cornered cat make strange leaps’. There is no logic to what she does, why she initially keeps working with Oh Yeong Chul even though she knows she’s much safer under the protection of Se Yeon and Min. The only thing that justifies her actions is that if she cut ties with her stepfather again, she really wouldn’t have had a single chance to find her mother again. Her mother, Jang Sun Young (played by Lee Ji Hyun) has become so mentally damaged due to the emotional and physical abuse of her ex-husband, but I found it remarkable how she recognized Hee Jin as her daughter IMMEDIATELY, despite the fact the last time she saw her was probably in when Hee Jin was a teenager (I’m not 100% sure about their timeline). Anyways, seeing them getting reunited was very heartwarming for as long as it lasted. Too bad that she also recognized Ji Wook as her son and never suspected for a minute that he could be in league with his father. The mother led Ji Wook to them multiple times because of her blind trust in him, and this is what ultimately became her downfall.
All in all, Jang Sun Young can be seen as the biggest victim in everything. She was abused by her husband, forced to raise her daughter in fear after her son left their household without even looking back at his mom and younger sister and just tried to save himself. After being admitted to a nursing home because she wasn’t able to take care of herself anymore, she was tricked by her son again into going somewhere ‘safer’ while he was just trying to keep her away from her daughter. All the while she trusted him, although she wasn’t mentally stable anymore she did still recognize her children because they were all she had left. After being temporarily reunited with her daughter, her ex-husband and son kept kidnapping her and hurting her and even dragged her barely conscious body away after she’d just woke up from being physically assaulted again. She barely woke up again, only to be killed cruelly by her own son, who then continued to stuff her body into a suitcase only to dump it in the ocean.
That was the scene that broke me the most. Ji Wook throwing that suitcase into the water right in front of Heejin, who was unable to do anything but scream at him to stop. Jang Sun Young deserved better, she was such a fragile but brave sweet woman and it was awful how it ended for her. Out of all the things that happened in the series, this was probably the thing that angered me the most.
I completely understood why this drove Heejin to abandon all sense of fear and plainly ran her brother over with a car. At that point, nothing mattered to her anymore. I also think it was a good move of her to move to the countryside after everything was wrapped up and Ji Wook was prosecuted. The city now only carried these extremely bad memories for her, and even though she used to be such a city girl, it showed maturity of her to start her own life over, away from everything. And honestly, what else did she have left for her in the city? Not much, as far as I can tell.

Seo Ji Wook is such a complicated character. In the beginning you just can’t say for sure whether he’s also being manipulated by his dad or that he’s willingly helping him. It doesn’t seem like he has sympathy for his father, he also chose to walk away from him, but it seemed to me as if he simply couldn’t cut his ties with him. Maybe he realized that he was too much like him after all. I honestly don’t understand what went on in Ji Wook’s head. When he first took Jang Sun Young away from that nursing home, a part of me still believed that he also didn’t want his mother to end up in his father’s hands, that he was also concerned for her wellbeing. But then he just went and killed her. And that was the point where I really thought, Okay, yep, we’ve lost him, there’s nothing to redeem him now. It was in that moment when Oh Yeong Chul died for real, that he seemed to accept his fate and the moster that he had become. He even went as far as to threaten his adoptive father, who kept covering for him for a while. I was really glad when the Judge deciding that he wasn’t going to cover for him anymore, because he did become aware of what his son made him do wasn’t right and it was better to confess to his own crimes, even if that meant endangering himself. You could say that Ji Wook (or Tae Jin) was even worse than Oh Yeong Chul, but I would personally put them on the same level. Oh Yeong Chul was delusional, he couldn’t see the harm in his acts, he justified every single murder he committed, so you could say his mental state fed his actions. But Ji Wook’s case was so ambiguous. He was so hard to read, but it did seem like he was sociopathic because of his lack of emotion and sympathy towards, anyone really. For a while I believed that Ji Wook wasn’t like his father, and in this I drew comparisons with the father-son relationship in Come and Hug Me as well. But Ji Wook did follow in his father’s footsteps, for whatever reason. The only reason I can think of is that he would always be traced back to Oh Yeong Chul, because he’d aided him before, and he was just fixed on remaining Seo Ji Wook rather than Oh Tae Jin. This is the only motivation I can think he’d have in killing Se Yeon, because she was getting too close to identifying his father as the serial killer and she might find out he was involved as well. But then again, his lack of self will in this was really confusing to me. I just couldn’t tell what his own motives or thoughts were. I think he could’ve just as well cut those ties with Oh Yeong Chul, because he was basically in the same position as Hee Jin. He could’ve chose to save his mother rather than becoming the same monster as his father. I believe that was his own choice, so I would still put him on the same level of monster as his father. Honestly, this father-son relationship was so confusing, especially from the son’s side. Why make it seem like you’re running away from your father to give yourself a chance at a new life, only to reconnect and just help him along in his cruel deeds and becoming his accomplice, whilst still pretending you’re that other guy’s son? I really didn’t follow it anymore.

As I discussed a little before, Oh Yeong Chul was a classic example of a merciless murderer. He didn’t care about anyone and – in contrast to the guy from Come and Hug Me for example – also wasn’t concerned about his children whatsoever. They were only of use to him if they could help him with something, but otherwise I really believe he wouldn’t have had a problem killing them either. He was a monster from the start, an abusive husband turned serial killer all the while living under the disguise of a revered surgeon. He had no filter, he just literally killed anyone who got in his way, even in the most trivial way.
However, he had one major weakness that ultimately became his downfall: Abyss. Even when he acquired ownership of the marble, he never fully understood how it worked. He eventually convinced himself that, if he were to die and be revived by Abyss again, his face would change again and he would be able to get away once more. So his plan was to inject himself with some lethal stuff and get Hee Jin to help revive him with the marble, not knowing that only the owner was able to revive people and yeah, he wouldn’t be able to revive himself when he died. So that was cleverly played by Hee Jin, admittedly, leading him to believe that. Anyways, although that’s what floored him (literally) in the end, he did manage to leave a legacy in the form of his son. So you could say that, even after his son left his household – which seems to have been to get away from him – he still managed to get Tae Jin right where he wanted him: at his disposal.

I’ll go on to a few criticisms, so points that annoyed me or that I think could’ve been explained a bit more clearly.
First of all, Hee Jin. I’m not going to lie, Hee Jin really aggravated me in the beginning. While it’s more than understandable her mother was her main concern, and it can be seen as admirable that she’d do anything to find and protect her mother, she just went about it the completely wrong was. It was SO obvious that Oh Yeong Chul was NOT the person to trust here and that he only followed his own interests. She should’ve known that he didn’t care one bit about her mother and wouldn’t simply let her be reunited and then leave them in peace for eternity without ever bothering them again. Still, she kept falling for his promises. She kept caving to him, believing that he would actually help her find her mother. After being kidnapped by him herself, I understand why she’d feel like he had a hold on her, but after being betrayed by his promises time and time again, she should’ve realized that she should just stay away from him! Instead he managed to keep her on a leash multiple times, and she kept falling for it. She even went as far as to tell him about Abyss and that the woman looking like Mi Do was actually Se Yeon, that she looked differently because she was revived by Abyss, and all of that! She ratted out the two people who were on her side the most, especially Min. In the beginning, Min was still very concerned about Hee Jin, it was clear he still cared about her – as she’d suddenly vanished after she’d broken up with him – but after this happened he was able to move on from her for good, she’d proven that she really couldn’t be trusted anymore. That being said, after she’d already betrayed them twice or so, they kept leaving her alone! I would’ve said, Rule number 1, never leave Hee Jin by herself again. Every single time they did, she grabbed her phone again to secretly correspond with someone claiming to have info on her mom, when they left her to go somewhere by herself, she kept being kidnapped or assaulted… she just really shouldn’t have been left alone ever again after her initial escape from Oh Yeong Chul. It was just frustrating how they kept making that same mistake, and I found myself screaming in disbelief at the screen every time this happened again. She just seemed like such a weak character in the beginning, and even when she tried bluffing her way through this, she just ended up powerless again. I have to give her credit for manning up in the end, I mean, she did manage to trick Oh Yeong Chul into his own downfall at the end, and she did become more mature, but it just took a very long time to get there.
Secondly, and this also always baffles me in drama series: how severely everyone underestimated Oh Yeong Chul. I mean, whenever anyone got a whiff of where he was, they just blindly went after him, no back-up, not even a weapon or ANYTHING to defend themselves with, they kept going after him empty-handed and then were always ‘surprised’ by his counter-attack. Oh, what a surprise, he’s carrying a syringe with him, I should’ve thought of the fact that he would never be empty-handed even while on the run! Honestly, I don’t know what they were thinking – they probably weren’t, they probably just went after him blindly – but it KEPT happening.
And the same thing happened when they went after Seo Ji Wook. Even after they already knew it was him, and they just needed to find a way to legally arrest him, they still left him alone long enough to get away. When they pulled that clever trick in legally finding evidence in his house, the police just walked out whistling and left him there and I was like ?? You have him right here! Now you’re going back to your station to officially declare the evidence as sufficient material to arrest him for, but in the meantime you’re giving him enough time to leave his house and get another burner phone and everything! Like, sometimes the police was just so negligent and naive in believing that now they’d got the guy, he would just keep still until they came for him to lock him up.

As far as more explanation goes, I really would’ve like more information on Abyss. I was really looking forward to seeing those alien people again at the end, where they’d come claim Abyss back or at least appeared again to explain something. Even when they first gave the marble to Min, they didn’t say anything, they just told him to ‘keep it safe’. For what? Why would they give him Abyss in the first place if they didn’t even want him to use it? Even at the end, when Min temporarily disappeared because he used up all the chances he got to use Abyss, he managed to come back and I was SO curious to hear what had happened. I was really looking forward to that flashback where he’d explained why he’d been able to come back, waiting to see those alien people again – but then I didn’t get the flashback at all. I guess another alien person appeared and told him ‘I told you to only use it when necessary, now you’re doomed to live on your planet in pain and invisibility forever’. And I was like ??? That’s all you’re going to give him? After everything he’d been through? You’re just going to call him out on his own stupidity in overusing Abyss? In retrospect, I think those alien people were pretty irresponsible with the marble themselves too. I really just wanted to know more about Abyss, how it worked and what the heck its use was, changing people’s appearances when reviving them. Especially because it worked differently every time. Se Yeon and Min were both turned into completely different people, Oh Yeong Chul was just aged up, but neither Hee Jin nor Ji Wook went through any major physical change after being revived. I just really would’ve liked to know more about what the whole marble thing was about. Now it really just seemed as if it ended up in the wrong kind of situation, there just “happened” to be a serial killer case going on surrounding its new owner, but it actually never originally had anything to do with the case. The aliens just gave it to Min to make up for the fact they accidentally killed him. And they also seemed to sometimes forget about Abyss, with everything that was going on. Only when it would suddenly start to glow again would they go, ‘Oh right, we still got this thing’. As the series is called ‘Abyss’, I really would’ve thought the emphasis and focus would’ve been more on Abyss and what it entailed. So I’m not sure if I’m completely satisfied with how this was wrapped up, although of course I was happy it ended well.

All in all, although it may sound like I’m quite critical about this series, I do think it was very good. Honestly, I was just surprised by how intense and heavy it was from the start, and that it was more than I expected, but it did give me an amazing thrill. It never stopped being thrilling and exciting and I was really eager to see it through, so I do think the writers did a very good job. It was a very extensive series, and so much happened, and everything was so intricately connected to each other, both the people as the circumstances and the events. The serial killer and his accomplice proved themselves to be a very challenging duo, and the story really kept me on the edge of my seat the entire time. The minor annoyances I’ve mentioned don’t take anything away from the quality of the drama for me, they were just behaviors of the characters that I couldn’t really relate to.

Let me make some cast comments before I wrap up.

First of all, Park Bo Young. I believe it’s my first time reviewing one of her dramas, which is crazy! Anyways, she’s one of my favorite actresses. She always manages to proof that she’s so much more than just a cute, tiny woman, because her acting is THAT good. I think this is possibly the most angsty drama I’ve seen of her so far, where her character the most intense of situations. I was curious to see how she would take over the character from Kim Sa Rang, which is the case in any drama where people switch bodies. I think she managed to take on the confidence of Se Yeon very well, but also showed a very vulnerable side to her, one that she initially only dared show to Min, and even then reluctantly. She really dealt with her situation admirably and I’m glad that in the end she was able to tell her parents about her real identity and the mother immediately believed her since she’d already thought before that she was similar to her daughter. Anyways, she may have been a little high and mighty in the beginning, but I did like she allowed herself to become more vulnerable and this also helped her mature in the sense that for example, she opened up to her real feelings towards Min. I think she did very well.

I’ve seen Ahn Hyo Seop in a couple of dramas, like Splash Splash Love, Queen of the Ring, Thirty But Seventeen, and he’s also on a couple of dramas that are still on my to watch list. I didn’t have a strong opinion about him in the beginning, but after finishing Abyss he has been added to my list of actors I really like. This guy, this beanpole, is SUCH a puppy. I thoroughly enjoyed his performance in this drama. I think it also enabled him to show various sides to his acting. His character, or at least what happens to his characters, sets the whole story of this drama in motion. Things would’ve ended very differently if he didn’t have Abyss, and in my opinion he did manage to use it wisely, but I also think it would’ve helped him even more if he’d known more about its uses from the start. One of the alien people told him he’d left him a manual on how to use it, but it kept appearing as fragmented warnings at random moments rather than that it was an actual manual that he could read in advance. Therefore he was forced to learn more about it along the way, as he was using it. Only at the end, when there was one final chance to use left, did it care to mention that ‘oh yeah, btw, if you use up the last use, you’ll disappear as well’. Like, he could’ve been prepared so much better! But he was a very sympathetic character and I also liked that, despite his unconditional love for Se Yeon, he wasn’t blinded by it, he didn’t stop caring for other people around him either, like Hee Jin, her mother, his own mother, Se Yeon’s parents… He helped a LOT of people and that just proved that he was a good person through and through.

The only thing that I wanted to remark on, something that still isn’t very clear to me, is why it was so necessary to transform the two main characters, and mainly Min. When he transformed after being revived, the alien people also seemed to be confused as to why he changed so much, but they explained it to him that he was reborn with a face that ‘would make his life easier’. However, throughout the series they kept bringing up that Min’s former looks weren’t something to be desired, and despite everything I really still find myself thinking about the sincerity of this. Because it really did seem like it was easier for Se Yeon to get closer to him because of his new looks. It definitely made the process of growing closer easier for them. I kept thinking how fun it would be if they suddenly were transformed back to their old appearaces in the last episode, and how that would’ve played out. Would it really have been proven that they had grown to love each other so much that their looks didn’t matter anymore? I couldn’t help but wonder about it. I’ve said this about Ahn Se Ha before as well, I feel like his looks are putting him in these kinds of roles a lot. Since he’s not seen as conventionally attractive, they keep casting him in roles of a guy that’s not attractive. And I think that must sting, in a way, knowing that you’re being cast knowingly because the role you’re playing shouldn’t be too handsome. It’s really a shame, because Ahn Se Ha is a great actor and he deserves to be acknowledged for that rather than that he might not have ‘the looks’. So I don’t know, even though they kept telling each other that their looks didn’t matter anymore in the end, I still wondered what would’ve happened if they’d suddenly woken up in their old bodies again, if really nothing would’ve been different. I just wonder!

It’s funny because I didn’t recognize Kwon Soo Hyun from anything, but apparently he’s been in a bunch of stuff I’ve seen, like High Society, Age of Youth, Laughter in Waikiki and Move to Heaven! He’s also in a bunch of my to-watch stuff, so I guess I will be seeing more of him! You know what they say: if you really grow to hate a villain in a story, it just means that the actor did a good job. I had the same with his character in this series. I was really hoping something would happen that would redeem him, I was hoping some sort of humanity would come out as some point that would make me relate to him, but it didn’t and the transformation he went through in this series was pretty remarkable. As I’ve discussed, I’m still not sure about his true motives, and whether he voluntarily chose to still be like his father or that he’d somehow felt like he didn’t have a choice. I have no idea. The only thing I will never forgive his character for is killing Jang Sun Young, that just went too far for me. Otherwise, I think he did very well, especially in keeping the charade of whether he actually had anything to do with the case or not. It wasn’t revealed all at once, so it really kept me on the edge of my seat.

When checking Lee Shi Eon on DramaWiki, I realize I know him from a wide variety of series, like Kill Me, Heal Me, High-end Crush, W, Star of the Universe, Reunited Worlds, I’m Not a Robot, and Hotel Del Luna. He is a familiar face in K-Dramas, let’s keep it at that. I really liked his character. He was the slightly awkward police officer who became a key figure in solving this big case and he responded to the situation like any regular person that suddenly learned about glowing marbles that brought people back to life. He was the character that had to deal with facts and physical evidence, he was not in a position to just believe everything that was thrown at him. And even after he believe it himself, he needed strong proof to support the evidence to the rest. He worked very hard, and I’m really glad that he himself never got into any seriously life-threatening danger by the serial killer. He remained one of the people that wasn’t able to see the marble until the end, and he was still one of the most important people in solving the case. I liked his team of colleagues as well, they were a fun bunch. The way they just barged into Ji Wook’s house with that warrant to pick up that piece of evidence really cracked me up. And also good for him that he got back with Mi Do! It took him some time to get used to her new face, but they were a cute couple and I also liked that Mi Do became a trustworthy person to Se Yeon in the end.

I’ve seen Han So Hee in a couple of things and I know that she’s recently been very active in new dramas as well, so good for her! I’ve seen her in Reunited Worlds and 100 Days My Prince and I will see more of her in future to-watch list dramas too. Her character definitely made a big impression on me here, I think this is the first time I really noticed her (that or I’ve just never seen her in a major role before). Anyways, despite my initial annoyance towards Hee Jin, I still think the actress did a good job portraying her. We shouldn’t be too hard on Hee Jin, because you can’t blame people who aren’t able to stand up for themselves in trauma-inducing situations like this. I kept judging her for continuously making the wrong choices, but she really just wanted to try everything to get a lead on her mom, and as we say, when cornered, we sometimes lash out in peculiar ways. She really killed me in the scene where she watched her mother’s body being disposed of by her brother, and afterwards I just really respected her determination to get revenge, although it didn’t work out exactly as she planned. I also think now that her decision to dump Min so harshly was for his own good – it was obvious to her that he still loved Se Yeon and, she chose to liberate the both of them so that neither of them would remain stuck in this set up relationship. So that might have actually been a noble thing of her to do, although the manner in which she did it still wasn’t nice, they were engaged to be married at that point, after all. Anyways, I think it was a very intense character to portray, but she did very well in my opinion. Both scenes that made the biggest impact on me featured her, the one I mentioned before, and in a good way, the scene where she and her mom were reunited. It warmed my heart when the mom suddenly ran after her in the hospital after recognizing her, because I just hadn’t anticipated that she would recognize her daughter as an adult. That was a really beautiful moment.

Lee Sung Jae, I will never look at him the same again, haha. And to think I only knew him before as the pasta restaurant guy from Jealousy Incarnate! What a character to portray. He was genuinely terrifying in his calm and threatening ways. He was sincerely scary, especially because he didn’t need a specific reason to kill his victims. He picked them quite randomly as he went about his day, so there wasn’t a clear routine in how he picked them out. The only thing that seemed clear as that it was always someone that had pissed him off, even the most trivial way. He didn’t have a pattern in that it were always people from the same sex or age, that really didn’t matter and that made him very unpredictable. There was just no stopping this guy, he would’ve gone on doing it forever if he wasn’t physically incapacitated. I was in disbelief in how merciless he was, because it made him all the more dangerous that he seemed so inhuman. He really didn’t care about anyone, and nothing would get in his way, he would never show mercy to anyone because he wasn’t able to empathize with people. He was a strong force to be reckoned with, for sure.

I want to give two last shoutouts, the first one obviously goes to Mrs. Lee Ji Hyun. I love this woman. She stole my heart in The Package, and now everytime I see her my heart just lights up. I cared about tout of all the people whose lives were wrecked by Oh Yeong Chul, she will always be his biggest victim. He and Ji Wook went through all that trouble to make sure this frail, mentally unstable woman never said anything again and it was awful. She wasn’t able to defend herself anyway, so their assault on her was just cowardly. Every murder is cowardly, but to go after such an easy target because you know she can’t even defend herself – that hurt a lot. I just wanted to emphasize how much I love this actress and how much I loved her character, she really did what she could until the end to protect her children, even though one of them betrayed her in the cruellest way possible.

I lastly want to mention the character Park Gi Man (played by Lee Chul Min). He was the father of one of Oh Yeong Chul’s earlier victims, a teenage girl named Min Ji. After her death, Park Gi Man cut ties with everything and everyone in his family, and he is seen in the beginning protesting outside Se Yeon’s prosecuting office that they should’ve dealed with Min Ji’s case better since the culprit is still out there. He has a few head-to-head confrontations with Oh Yeong Chul, they keep wounding each other but they keep recovering from it. I kept worrying because from the start it was clear that this man could prove to be a valuable asset to the case, and I was really scared that Oh Yeong Chul would still manage to silence Park Gi Man for good before he could share anything important with the police. He did play it on the edge though, because he also went to threaten that Judge that he knew that Ji Wook wasn’t his biological son, and because of that he also almost got into trouble because the Judge schemed a whole hit-and-run accident around him. In the end though, I was so glad that Park Gi Man was there when the Judge made the public announcement that Ji Wook was indeed not his biological son, I’m glad they ended up working together and that the Judge came to the conclusion that confessing his own crimes and therefore giving up his own reputation and career was still a better choice than trying to cover up for a fugitive.
Anyways, Park Gi Man was as much a victim of Oh Yeong Chul as a family member of one of his victims, and I’m glad he was still able to contribute to the case after repeatedly endangering his own life by going after the serial killer himself. This man really had nothing to lose and it was very brave of him.
I have seen this actor in Romantic Doctor, Teacher Kim, Strong Woman Do Bong Soon, Duel and The Beauty Inside, but he definitely made an impact on me in this drama. In the beginning he was quite the suspicious man, because you weren’t sure of his intentions, and there was even the possibility that he would go after Se Yeon because she wasn’t dealing his daughter’s case properly and had ignored his protests. But I’m glad that he was on the good side, and it made him a kind of lone hero, the way he threw away everything and just went blindly after this killer to give his daughter’s spirit some peace.
So I just wanted to give a shoutout to this actor and this character, since they provided another side to the story, showing that the people that are left behind are as much a victim as the murder victims themselves.

Also, there was the old man! There was this elderly man that lived in Se Yeon’s neighborhood, and they had some quarrel about him always storing his cardboards under her house or something. Anyways, he was in the area the night Se Yeon got killed and he’s the one who tells her and Min that he actually saw a younger man leaving her house that night, the accomplice aka Ji Wook. This elderly guy keeps popping up, and in the end he is the only one who can see Min after he’s ‘disappeared’ and sentenced by the alien people to live in invisibility. Then Min finds out that this man actually has an Abyss marble of his own! How this man was linked to Abyss, how he got it, we don’t know and we don’t find out, but it was suggested that he knew more about it than it seemed. I was curious to know a bit more about this too, to be honest!

Lastly, can we please all appreciate the cameo of Jung So Min and Seo In Guk as the alien people?? I was SO excited to see them and they were hilarious! That’s also why I was hoping they would appear again at the end, but alas! I did wonder who the alien figure was who appeared to Min when he disappeared because it was definitely not either of them, although Min’s narration said ‘I met them again’. I would’ve liked them to appear again T^T Haha, anyways, bless that cameo!!

It seems like I managed to keep this review relatively short, I’m proud of myself, haha! Honestly, this series has such a loaded story, there are so many events, so many side story lines, so many characters that get involved in different ways, I could not even begin to note every single thing that happens. What matters is most is that Se Yeon and Min find each other in tackling this serial killer case together with some valuable partners, they make new allies along the way and they manage to bring both the culprits to justice, Oh Yeong Chul dies because of his own ignorance concerning Abyss, and Ji Wook gets prosecuted and receives a death sentence for everything he’s committed, not only murdering people himself but also aiding Oh Yeong Chul in his actions etc. So you could say it’s a fairly ‘happy ending’, Dong Chul and Mi Do get married, Se Yeon and Min get married. It was said that Abyss would disappear as soon as he would receive an even bigger miracle than the marble, and he thought that Se Yeon would be enough, but the marble finally dissolves the moment she finds out she’s pregnant, so I guess that was his last biggest wish.
I did find it a bit suspicious that they were already quite at ease with the situation and went on dates before Ji Wook was locked up for good, but I’m glad at least they got their peace in the end, and they got to live out their lives together in these new bodies. I did find it funny how Se Yeon suddenly started to question whether their baby would resemble them or their old selves, and that in the latter case, she was worried the child would look like Min, which was kind of a sting, haha. Anyways, it was a happy ending for our main couple.

Speaking of their chemistry, which I always like to talk about, I still wanted to mention that I thought it was really good. I never expect anything less from Park Bo Young because I know she always delivers in romantic scenes, my biggest references here are Oh My Ghostess! and Strong Woman Do Bong Soon, forever two of my favorite Park Bo Young dramas. (I am so excited for Doom At Your Service where she’ll be starring alongside Seo In Guk!!) Anyways. Their kissing scenes were really satisfying, there were no pufferfish instances, you could see how immersed the two were in their performed love for each other that it just all made sense. Very well done!

And with that final remark I will conclude my review of this very intense drama. No, I cannot stop repeating that it was intense, haha. It’s definitely not a light watch, but it did a good job of balancing the heavy events with lighter and romantic scenes, so it wasn’t just a continuous angst fest, which was good. I guess my only issue with it is that with the title being ‘Abyss’, I had thought that marble would really be at the center of the story, or it really would’ve been about the marble. Instead the marble just happened to appear within this already dire situation of the serial killer and in many ways it only complicated it, but it definitely was a good thing that it revived so many people and consequently enabled these people to help contribute to the solving of this case. It’s a good thing that it didn’t do much damage in the bad people’s hands, after all!

I am now moving on to another Netflix K-Drama that I’ve been interested in, I believe it has (or will have) multiple seasons so I’ll see when I’ll be able to put out another review. Thanks for reading and until next time! Bye-bee~~ ^^

Disclaimer: this is a review, and as such it contains spoilers of the whole series. Please proceed to read at your own risk if you still plan on watching this show or if you haven’t finished it yet. You have been warned.

Boku no Hatsukoi wo Kimi ni Sasagu
(僕の初恋をキミに捧ぐ / I Give My First Love To You)
MyDramaList rating: 6.5/10

Hiya! It hasn’t been long (just a couple of days actually) since my last review, but I finished this one really fast since it’s pretty short. Also, I got my booster shot today and I can feel my arm getting sore so I’m hoping to finish this review before I won’t be able to lift my arm in the morning. xD Anyways, I’m back with a new, be it short, review!
There was a slight confusion on my side about which one I wanted to watch. Apparently, there was a movie version in 2009 featuring Inoue Mao (MAKINO <3) and Okada Masaki. DramaCool put the wrong picture to the wrong version, so that was a bit confusing. Since I knew I would be finishing this drama in a few days, I also watched the movie version just to see how they would differ from each other. This drama version is from 2019, so exactly 10 years later. It feels like ages ago that I last watched a Japanese drama and I forgot how short they tend to be. But I still have a weak spot for these kinds of series. You just know they’re going to break your heart, you know you’re probably going to cry, but you still watch them. It reminded me a little of Koizora, which also has both a movie and a drama version. Okay, I’m drifting off. Let’s get started with this review!

Boku no Hatsukoi wo Kimi ni Sasagu is a 7-episode drama about two teenagers, Kakinouchi Takuma (played by Nomura Shuhei) and Taneda Mayu (played by Sakurai Hinako). They’ve known each other since childhood, and have been in love with each other since childhood. Takuma, however, has a serious heart disease and it’s already been established that he probably won’t live longer than 20. The two kids met in the hospital, since Mayu’s father (played by Namase Katsuhisa) works there. He even happens to be Takuma’s attending doctor. While Takuma’s parents (played by Kojima Kazuya and Ishida Hikari) worry about their child’s life and health and if/how he can ever be cured, Takuma sometimes sneaks out of the hospital to play with Mayu, ignoring the fact that any kind of strain can be dangerous for him. It is because of these happenings, from their childhood to their teenage years, that Takuma’s mother has taken a strong dislike towards Mayu – she thinks she has a bad influence on him and only helps worsen his health.

The first thing I found interesting to see here was that the relationship between Takuma and Mayu already differs from the beginning compared to the movie. In the movie, they’re already a couple and they’re even already quite intimate with each other. In the drama, as soon as we’re introduced to Takuma and Mayu as teenagers, Takuma is initially avoiding Mayu. He loves her, but he knows that she’ll never be happy with him, because he will eventually leave her due to his illness, so he tries to stay away from her to save her the heartbreak. Mayu is feisty, though, so she doesn’t let him off so easily. She even follows him to high school, which he picked to get away from her. Doesn’t matter, she still follows him. Ironically, Takuma’s mother was actually responsible for this, since she came to Mayu to ask why Takuma was suddenly going to that particular school and if that had been Mayu’s idea. Instead, she gave Mayu the information she needed to also transfer to that school.
So now they’re in the same class. Takuma quickly makes a friend, Suzuya Ritsu (played by Sato Kanta). Ritsu’s older brother, Suzuya Kou (played by Miyazawa Hio) is the eccentric ‘prince’ of the school – he’s that popular ikemen senpai that all the girls fawn over and also boasts his charms freely to whoever wants (or doesn’t want) to listen. Kou becomes interested in Mayu from the day of the entrance ceremony when she confronts Takuma in front of everyone and chases him down when he tries to run away.
Mayu becomes close with two classmates, Yuiko and Satomi (respectively played by Yahagi Honoka and Fukumoto Riko). They are also in the same archery club.
This is basically the main cast of the series, Takuma and Mayu, their parents, their classmates/friends, and Suzuya Kou. It’s a really simple and easy-to-follow story without any distracting side plots.

So yeah, of course the story is about Takuma and Mayu getting together and then facing Takuma’s health issues. There are some minor storylines that create obstructions to their relationship, but these of course only draw them closer to one another. The most apparent one is the one featuring Kou as a potential love rival, although we already know from the start he won’t be able to get in the way of Takuma’s and Mayu’s mutual attraction to each other. Kou was initially a bit annoying to me, he was really charai (really don’t know how to translate this properly to English, flashy, gaudy, not hesitant to hit on girls?) He literally introduces himself to the first years at the entrance ceremony as his Tinder profile. And then he immediately takes a liking to Mayu, he calls her ‘Hime’ (‘Princess’) and he keeps telling her to stop pursuing Takuma since he’s going to die anyway (his place? not his place? you tell me). It turns out that Kou and Ritsu’s father had the same disease as Takuma and passed away, despite telling them that ‘everyone would be okay’. So now Kou has become a bit sceptical about these kinds of things. It was a bit annoying how he kept butting into their business at first, he just assumed he had the right to tell Takuma and Mayu to stop going after each other because Takuma would eventually die and leave Mayu behind crying, like his father did to his mother. I get that he wanted to protect Mayu from that (although I still found it very hasty of him to already push his feelings onto her like that), but in my opinion, it still wasn’t his place. He was just interested in ‘obtaining’ Mayu at that point. What is it with men in Japanese dramas always talking about how a woman is their possession or that he will ‘take her’/’make her his’? I’ve watched a couple of Japanese movies before this and the male leads were ALL like this. Not cute.
Anyways, he actually gets a chance when Mayu at some point starts to believe that Takuma has really rejected her, but that doesn’t last long because Takuma changes his mind after Mayu and Kou get in a car accident while on a drive. After that, Kou is out of the picture again just like that. He dealt with it maturely though, this is actually the point where he starts to act more ‘normal’ and moves on with his life.

I have to say that I don’t necessarily mind side storylines as long as they contribute to the main story and help create stronger bonds between the lead characters. However, two of the storylines in this series actually led to two people dying, and I did find that a little bit extreme.

First of all, Teru-chan. Teru (played by Baba Fumika) is a teenage girl with a similar (or the same?) heart condition as Takuma, who also knew him from when they were kids in the hospital. They meet again as teenagers, and then Takuma starts visiting Teru daily, much to Mayu’s discontent. Of course, to Takuma, this is only a friendly favor, he knows how lonely it gets to be in the hospital all by yourself, and he doesn’t want Teru to feel lonely. However, Mayu is right to be wary, because it does seem that Teru has ulterior motives. She is very clingy towards Takuma, keeps texting him that he needs to come visit her every day, that she only has him as her company. At some point, she even starts acting like they’re a couple. As in, when some nurses assume this about them, she doesn’t deny anything. As soon as Takuma wants to clear things up about this, she ‘suddenly’ gets heart cramps. It doesn’t take the nurses long to figure out she’s actually faking these attacks. We’re led to see Teru as a bit manipulative. I also thought that, no matter how sad her situation was, it wasn’t right of her to use her illness as a way to manipulate someone into staying by her side. I personally call this ‘pulling a Terius’ (yes, a Candy Candy reference). Anyways, she plays on Takuma’s good nature to stay by her side and even gets him to almost kiss her. Purely for the reason that she doesn’t want to die before being kissed, but she definitely has in mind that this will impact his relationship with Mayu, so it’s still not a very nice thing to do. I was honestly surprised that he agreed to it. Or at least, he backed out at the last moment, but he didn’t seem to hesitate at first. In the movie, he’s too busy staring at her in a confused way until she just kisses him herself without his full consent. Mayu sees this, of course. It’s the kind of drama where everyone sees everything at the wrong moment. Okay, I’m drifting off again. Long story short, Takuma doesn’t feel like he can face Mayu with his true feelings before he’s honestly told Teru that he’s not romantically interested in her. When he does this, however, Teru gets an actual heart attack and dies. Right there, on the hospital roof. I really didn’t know what to think of that. I felt it was kind of random, and also still wasn’t able to completely feel sorry for Teru, because it just seemed like she wasn’t able to face the truth. Hearing this from Takuma, while she must have already expected it because she was so busy changing the subject every time he brought it up, shouldn’t have had such a fatal influence on her. But yeah, she passes away.

And then there’s Kou. Honestly, when I watched the movie, this was the most random thing ever. But I guess that had to do with the fact that when this happened to Kou in the movie, Takuma and Mayu weren’t even that close to him (yet). He had just given up on his one-sided crush on Mayu (which no one asked for, certainly not Mayu) and just when he got himself another (random, unnamed) girlfriend he suddenly got hit by a truck. In the drama version, Kou’s story is build up much better, in my opinion. He got more introductory screentime and the accident only happens after we’ve already seen him become more mature and move on with his life after Takuma and Mayu get together.
In the drama version, as I said, he and Mayu get into a car accident together. They both come out fine, but it turns out later (too late) that Kou’s injury was more serious than they thought. He suddenly passes out on the street while buying a necklace for his new girlfriend, Yumi (Matsui Airi), who we also already knew as Kou’s friend in high school, so she was not some random, unnamed girl he just got together with as a rebound. We see how their relationship develops, her crush on him, and how he ultimately accepts her as well. To me, Kou’s death had way more impact in the drama series also because this couple was properly established. We actually get to feel sorry for Yumi as well, because they only JUST got together and were a supercute pair.
And then the most painful part: Kou’s heart potentially going to Takuma for his transplant. Again, it felt a bit weird in the movie because Takuma refused to do the transplant if it meant ‘taking a friend’s heart’ while they really weren’t even close in the movie at that point. In the drama version this felt like a much more dramatic decision since they were actually on good terms by then. Takuma still decides not to do it, and Kou’s mother also decides to withdraw the donor agreement, so they’re back to square one.

I’ll end my analysis with the different endings of the two versions. In the movie, Takuma dies. There isn’t another option besides that heart transplant, he’s not getting it, so he takes Mayu out for one last date and then he’s gone. And then Mayu gets married to his ashes, which is… something.
In the drama, there is the second option of a risky heart surgery which Takuma agrees to take. Takuma and Mayu get married in the hospital, with brain-dead Kou present as their witness, which is… also something. Takuma leaves Mayu his will just in case he doesn’t survive the surgery.
But the final scene is of Mayu on the school roof, looking up when ‘someone’ says her name and we see her smile at that person. Honestly, I hate these kinds of endings. They did this in Big and My Absolute Boyfriend as well. Just show us that it’s Takuma! Why is that so hard?? Anyways, it’s suggested that he survives the surgery. So much for all the dramatics. Just kidding, it’s a good thing he survived, of course. But still.

I’m glad that I watched both versions, especially because they were so different. When watching the movie I was wondering if I wasn’t spoiling the series for myself already, but I was glad to see that they weren’t exactly the same. Of course there were some parts that were the same, but the drama series extended some parts to create more storylines and development for the characters.
One thing I did prefer about the movie version though, was the intimacy between Takuma and Mayu. I know that Japanese dramas are shy when it comes to kissing and other intimacy scenes, but in the movie Takuma and Mayu are seen smooching a lot of times, and I mean PROPER smooching. It just made them seem so much more like a couple that really loved each other, including the physical needs part. I mean, they even ‘had sex’ on their school campus, and even though they left the graphic bit out, they did show some really passionate kissing leading up to it. Meanwhile in the drama series, it literally skipped to ‘after’ they ‘had sex’. Like, they were talking outside after Takuma had decided not to take the transplant, and the next moment they were suddenly under the sheets in a hotel room and the deed had already been done. What a letdown! T^T I was missing intimacy, period. Even their few kisses didn’t seem to match their alleged ‘burning passion’ for each other, especially from Takuma’s side since he’d been holding it in for so long. In the movie, I really liked how passionate he was about this, just openly declaring that he wanted to have sex with Mayu. It was refreshing! I guess they needed to keep this drama series more teenager-approved or something. Oh well.

Let me just make some cast and character comments before I conclude.

I’ve seen Nomura Shuhei in a couple of dramas before, like Koinaka and Suki na Hito ga Iru Koto. I don’t actually have a solid opinion about him, haha. I think he’s okay, but I would need to see more of his acting to make a judgment of his acting. I do believe that this is one of the more cheerful roles that I’ve seen of him, which is typical since he was a heart patient who knew he was probably going to die within a year. But I have the feeling I’ve only seen him play stoic, tough guys that didn’t show much emotion before. So I’m glad to at least have seen one different side of him!

I really liked Sakurai Hinako in this, I’ve never seen her in anything before. I liked her energy from the start. I think she did that entrance ceremony scene more powerfully than Inoue Mao to be honest (I’m sorry Mao-san T^T). She just had a really nice presence, and I liked how well-balanced her bubbliness and gutsiness were. She also wasn’t shy to show her vulnerable sides. As an actor, I felt like she had a lot of opportunities to show her variety because she didn’t fit into just one category of ‘heroine’.

Kou was actually the one character that gave me too much manga-vibes. Like, he acted like a cartoon character in the beginning, the whole show around his introduction. If someone would do that in real life, people would be like ‘the F is this guy doing’. He was the only one that gave me some minor cringes in the beginning, also with him calling Mayu ‘Hime’ and all that? It just was too much like how this kind of character would be portrayed in a manga or anime. I’ve seen Miyazawa Hio before in Todome no Kiss. He has such a unique look! I just found out his mother is half-American. I really love his light eye color. I mean, I might have been cringed out a little by him in the beginning of the series, but you can’t deny that he’s the perfect typecast for a ‘prince’ type. He is really handsome. And he does mature, after letting Mayu go and moving on, we see him still agree to go out with Yumi and that he does really like her. So somewhere I was hoping they wouldn’t kill him off the way they did in the movie, but I guess his death is one of the key events in the original story. It was a shame, and also so sudden that out of nowhere, he just died on the spot, in the middle of the street. Of course, when he mentioned just before to Yumi on a date that his head was hurting a little, I was already like UH-OH. But yeah, I liked how he portrayed Kou’s character better than the movie version, to be honest. In the movie his character just wasn’t very well-established and you didn’t really get an impression of who he really was behind his antics.

I kept wondering where I knew Sato Kanta from… only to find out he was Irie-kun in the Itazura na Kiss movies!!! O_O He couldn’t have been more different in this series, hahaha. He was just the kind and loyal classmate friend. I find it an interesting decision that they made him Kou’s brother in the series. He wasn’t related to him in the movie. In the movie, the only family to mourn for Kou were his mother and grandfather, but here it was his mother and Ritsu. I guess it was an easy way to bind the characters more closely together? I did feel bad for Ritsu though, because at some point it looked like he would lose his brother and his best friend at practically the same time 🙁 I liked him in this role. It even made me completely forget about him being Irie-kun, which is impressive. xD

Speaking of Itazura na Kiss – different version though – Honoka-chan! I’ve loved Yahagi Honoka ever since I saw her in ItaKiss, her portrayal of Kotoko is still my favorite so far. Plus she’s so cute. T^T I keep feeling like she’s a main actress, but apart from ItaKiss I’ve only seen her in supporting roles, like in Kizoku Tantei and Nee Sensei, Shiranai no?. I was really happy that she was such a supporting friend and really wanted to help Takuma and Mayu get together. I also liked that there seemed to be something growing between her and Ritsu, and now all the more since they turn out to be a Kotoko and Irie-kun from two different versions, haha. Her character didn’t have any back story or development per se, but I don’t think that was necessary. It’s also nice to have some simple supporting characters there that are always on the main leads’ sides.

Matsui Airi also seemed very familiar to me, and after searching DramaWiki I see I must know her from Yamada-kun to Nanajin no Majo and Watashi Kekkon Dekinainjanakute, Shinaindesu. She has a very familiar face. I liked that her character was created in this drama, she didn’t appear in the movie, at least not as Kou’s classmate before they eventually started dating. Although she was cold to Mayu just a little bit in the beginning, after it was clear that Mayu had rejected Kou and Yumi was able to make her move, she became more friendly with Mayu as well. And honestly, she didn’t even make her move as in, pushed herself onto Kou. Their dating relationship just happened from both sides, and that was nice to see. I would’ve loved to see more scenes of her and Kou together before he died, though. T^T

I feel like such an oaf! I thought I recognized Baba Fumika from somewhere, only to realize she was the main lead in Nee Sensei, Shiranai no?! She was Hana, of course! I’m just shook with how bad I’m getting at recognizing Japanese actors’ faces, but it’s probably because I watch too many K-Dramas. :’) Anyways, of course she wasn’t a popular character and I admit I got very annoyed with Teru as well, especially when she started faking her condition just to keep Takuma by her side. But Takuma’s reasoning actually made it easier to forgive her for that. It was still sad that she had to die like that, of course, she was only 17. But like Kou, I also found her character very typical. You always have that girl that pretends to be sweet and you can’t be mean to her because she’s sick, but secretly she’s not completely pure after all in her greed. I couldn’t blame her for wanting company, but it wasn’t nice of her to hog Takuma like that, also very much with the intention to keep him away from Mayu. But I guess, as I always say, if you don’t like a character, that usually means the actor did a good job!

Ishida Hikari is Ishida Yuriko’s sister! I’ve seen Ishida Yuriko in several dramas before, but it’s funny that her sister is also acting in dramas. I’ve only seen her before in Kirawareru Yuuki. I guess you always have to have ONE objecting parent in a love story, right? I mean, you can dislike Takuma’s mom all you want – and I do think she was occasionally out of line for dismissing Mayu like that – but it was also very easy to understand where she was coming from. I don’t think she actually hated Mayu. She was just thinking of her son’s safety and she saw how willingly he threw aside all restrictions when it came to Mayu. She was probably just worried that he’d do something stupid and end up hospitalized for good and her way of venting out that worry was to blame it on Mayu. That wasn’t right. But hey, she’s a mom with a sick child. You can’t completely blame her for only wanting to keep her son safe. I sometimes found her acting a bit too scripted, as if it wasn’t really coming from inside and she was just portraying the worried mom in her voice tone only. So I would like to see some more of her acting variety. Other than that, I think her character made sense in her objection, although it may have made her look like ‘the mean mom’. She wasn’t that bad, in the end.

Namase Katsuhisa is in literally everything, haha. I’ve seen him in Gokusen, Gakkou no Kaidan, Ishitachi no Renai Jijou and Kizoku Tantei and he’s also in some dramas that are still in my to watch list. He’s just such a classic actor. I like that this time, his character wasn’t responsible for the comic relief (I believe he gets casted as the hysterical principal a lot), but he was a very kind doctor and father to Mayu. Even though he and his wife weren’t always home together since they both had irregular jobs, there was no friction in their marriage and they got along just fine. Seeing your daughter in love with your patient, knowing that she might lose this boy she loves so much, that must give so much stress as a father. I think he remained relatively calm under it, mostly staying out of their relationship at all and just leaving them be (which was probably for the best). But it did give his character some pressure, since he had to balance being a father and being a professional doctor in this case that became quite personal. He was a minor character so maybe you wouldn’t stop to think about it, but it did occur to me that it did something to him as well. I’m just glad he was supportive of their relationship but still didn’t hide any information from Mayu about Takuma’s health. Was he allowed to though, with patient confidentiality and all that? Oh well.

Overall, it was very clear to me that this drama was based on a manga. There were some really typical situations and characters in there. Still, it didn’t bother me too much. It dealt with some heavy themes, after all, and I think they pulled that off well enough.

I’m not sure what to say in regards to the message of this story. I guess what can be taken from it is that it’s important to know that life is short and we are all given limited time, some less than others. I consider it a luxury to have good friends and even a lover in this time to share that limited time with. The relationship between Takuma and Mayu is really something special, you could really say that they’re destined for each other. They just never felt the need to look elsewhere from the moment they met as children.
And I think it’s also important to note that for a sick person, in the end it’s up to them to decide what to do. There’s always a lot of fuss being made by family and friends who all have their own opinions about what the patient should do, but in the end, the patient has the final vote in deciding what will happen to them. I think that’s something that Takuma’s character shows very well in this series. Against everyone’s expectations and hopes, he refuses a transplant, the safest way to save him, because he doesn’t feel right about taking his friend’s heart – and taking away the hope for recovery from his friends’ family.
It also felt right that in this drama adaptation of the movie 10 years later, they suddenly DID have another option besides the transplant. It was literally as if time had passed and medical science had progressed in the meantime. The only thing I found a bit of a bummer was that they made such a big deal of that surgery, and then didn’t even show Takuma when he recovered. We only hear his voice say ‘Mayu’, and then we’re left to just throw a party for him by ourselves that he apparently recovered. It built up to a dangerous surgery and then ended with not making a big deal out of it, after all. That’s how it felt to me, in any case. In the end, I would say the main message is probably to enjoy life and make the most out of it, especially when you’re in a situation where you’re not able to enjoy it for a regular lifespan.

Again, as I mentioned before, I’m glad I watched both versions. I feel like it contributed to this short review as well, because I was able to throw some comparisons in there. In summary, I would say I liked the drama version better, but I liked the relationship between movie Takuma and Mayu better, they just looked more like a naturally affectionate couple. I found the differences in writing choices interesting, such as making Ritsu Kou’s younger brother. It added more content of Kou being able to approach Ritsu to usher him into helping out with getting to Mayu etc. And also to add Yumi to the equation, although of course she ended up heartbroken. The drama version allowed me to feel more sympathy towards all the characters than the movie version. It just felt more spaced out, if that makes sense. It was definitely not the best Japanese series I’ve seen, but it was cute enough.

I’m now moving on to some Netflix K-Dramas again, I’m excited to start the next couple of series. I’m officially starting on my 2019 batch, y’all! So stay tuned and I’ll be back.

Bye-bee! ^^